


Minato Namikaze and the Destroyer of Worlds

by The_Carnivorous_Muffin



Series: Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Naruto
Genre: Absurdism, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Humor, Attempted Murder, Culture Shock, Depression, F/M, Female Harry Potter, Master of Death Harry Potter, Murder, Racism, Science Fiction, Suicide Attempt, Third Shinobi War, Violence, War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-14
Updated: 2019-06-24
Packaged: 2019-06-27 13:00:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 40
Words: 272,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15685944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Carnivorous_Muffin/pseuds/The_Carnivorous_Muffin
Summary: On October 10th when the Kyuubi no Kitsune ravages Konoha, Namikaze Minato unwittingly makes a bargain with Death. Years earlier, his life is rewritten when the overpowered, bizarre, and possibly alien Eleanor Lily Potter arrives at Konoha's orphanage and quickly becomes his best friend.





	1. Bell and Turing Tests

_In which Jiraiya meets his genin team and has an ominous feeling that they will be a lot more trouble than they’re worth, Minato makes a friend, and Ellie Potter decides that the world is secretly a giant genjutsu that isn’t even bothering to try anymore._

* * *

October 10th

A man with hair the color of sunshine, cloaked in white and red with a wide brimmed hat, a seal, the destruction and desperation of his people, his first born son, and then an offer.

Namikaze Minato, like others before him, makes his bargain with Death.

* * *

“Alright squirts, let’s all start by introducing ourselves, likes, dislikes, hobbies, and dreams. My name’s Jiraiya, I’m your jonin sensei. I like astoundingly busty and beautiful women and toads, I dislike being interrupted appreciating astoundingly busty and beautiful women and toads being mistaken for frogs, my hobbies include searching for and appreciating astoundingly busty and beautiful women, and my dream is to turn you all into awesome ninja.”

Jiraiya grinned at each of them and they all just stared back. Team seven was always an odd bunch of ducks, it was in how it was created, putting the best kunoichi graduate, shinobi graduate, and then the dead last together and then pounding it together until it mixed into something cohesive always got interesting results. Sometimes good, sometimes excellent, but other times…

This combination had produced his own team and for that they ignored the little oddities that came along with it. And boy, were there oddities with this group, he could tell that even from the files.

The boys weren’t too off the beaten path of normality (of course normal for a ninja was debatable anyway).

The blonde, Namikaze Minato, was hailed as the next rising star and had an excellent grasp of academy materials and technique. He was inventive, he thought outside of the box, and that more than his speed and power was indicative of a ninja that would become something to reckon with. The only odd thing was that he was an orphan, usually the geniuses came from the clans, where they were given preliminary instruction but he’d sort of popped up from nowhere. Originally when Sarutobi sensei had come to him about taking students, and he’d studied the files, he’d thought about maybe just taking the kid as an apprentice and seeing how he fared with fuinjutsu but a small argument with the Hokage had made it clear that it was genin team or nothing.

The other boy, a civilian born boy who’d sweated and bled his way through the academy wasn’t what Jiraya had been expecting but he wasn’t surprised. Having been dead last himself he knew that there usually was a reputation with dead last; they were the ones who didn’t get it the first, second, or third time but they were the ones who tried until they were bleeding; the ones who never gave up. This boy had that, but he didn’t have the normal weirdness that came with being dead last, that quirkiness that got on every academy chunin instructor’s nerves until they were looking for reasons to fail the poor bastard. This kid was supposedly quiet, extremely hard-working, but just had no natural talent and had only scraped his way out of the academy.

So pretty normal rookie of the year, kind of normal dead last, the weirdness came in with the top kunoichi.

Eru Lee’s (and what kind of a name was that for a little girl) file hadn’t been so much a file as it had been a book. If she had been a boy then Jiraiya suspected she’d be his dead last instead of his top kunoichi but apparently there was a fine line between idiocy and genius and her instructors honestly could not tell the difference.

Mastery over ninjutsu, to the degree that her academy instructors couldn’t assess her taijutsu abilities because she kept using ninjutsu to avoid it (apparently going so far as to somehow make a shield of solid invisible and undetectable chakra that blocked any sort of physical attack). Excelled in genjutsu but made use of it in order to skip class or fake the answers to her homework assignments. Struggled with hand seals, or rather, had apparently never felt the need to use them and still hadn’t learned any. Struggled with the concept of creating a clone (there were recorded incidents of her fighting her clones to the death when her clones declared that they wanted to be autonomous free beings) and just generally drove every instructor she’d ever had up the wall without even seeming to realize she was doing it.

She was going to be his problem tadpole.

The blonde started first, “My name’s Namikaze Minato,” He started smiling and motioning to himself, “I like ramen, reading, finding out new jutsu, I dislike those who insult my friends, my hobbies are… going on adventures? And my dream is to one day be hokage.”

Good likes, good dislikes, good dreams (ambitious but good too, somebody had to be Hokage), bit of a vague hobby but that was alright. There was just something about the kid that Jiraiya liked.

Dead last started next, “Hello, my name’s Matsuda Haru…” He trailed off looking at his teammates then at Jiraiya, “I like cooking I guess, I guess I dislike getting bad grades and making my parents upset, I don’t really have any hobbies, and… And my dream is to become an awesome ninja.”

That was a little vague but they could work with that, potentially, it all depended on how the bell test went of course. But he could grow into himself given time and who knew, maybe Jiraiya was selling him short, Jiraiya had been dead last too once upon a time.

(Not that Orochimaru had ever let him forget it; the bastard.)

The girl just looked at him for a few moments and that was when he first noticed it. She had no expression, not even a small expression, or the emotion of concealing your emotions. There was nothing in there, well not nothing because clearly there was some thought process going on back there, but like displaying emotions was a result or after thought and not a part of thinking.  

She had an odd foreign look to her; one that Jiraiya couldn’t place. Bright red hair, but not Uzumaki red, it had more yellow and orange in it than that. Her eyes were green, not hazel, but the green you saw in blades of grass and not in eyes. Pale like an Uchicha or Hyuga, but leaner than them, and her hair was an odd texture of loose curls, a kind he’d never really seen before (at least not naturally).

She was also an orphan, apparently she and Namikaze had been friends since back then, before they’d even entered the academy. Two genius orphans in one decade, Jiraiya couldn’t remember if that had ever happened before.

“I’m Eru Lee,” She finally said in a clipped and frankly odd accent. There was something off about her r’s the way she shaped them that again he couldn’t place (and wasn’t that going to drive him up the wall because he should be able to place something like that), “I like manipulating the inner workings of the universe with chakra, I dislike bureaucracy and the overwhelming yet strangely ineffective genjutsu that’s been placed over reality, I don’t have hobbies so much as weekly adventures with Minato, and I currently have no dreams.”

Namikaze’s face fell slightly at this, cringing, and with a glance towards Jiraiya he looked over at her and began to rapidly speak… gibberish… at least it sounded like gibberish (there were a lot of sounds there that Jiraiya didn’t know humans could even make) but she was cocking her head and listening.

“Strike that.” She said her eyes flicking back to Jiraiya and she started again, “I’m Eru Lee. I like ramen and ninjutsu, I dislike detention, I have a lot of hobbies, and my dream is world peace.”

She then smiled at him as if she had just aced some test and Jiraiya should give her some kind of a reward.

“Right, well, there’s that…” He really couldn’t think of anything else to say to that.

“Question,” The girl said a musing sort of expression on her features, “Why do we always do the same introduction? I mean, the likes, dislikes, hobbies and dreams?”

“Well, I think those things say a lot about us, don’t you?” Jiraiya countered, because it certainly told him a lot. True it didn’t tell him things like specialties and he was wondering if the girl would bring that up, which was a bit of a drag, because she should know that genin weren’t at a level to have any sort of specialty.

The girl gave him a dubious sort of look as if she was unimpressed by his logic, “Anyone can answer that sort of question, Dudders could have answered that and he’s not even a real person.”

“Dudders?”

“My fat whale of a cousin, he’s secretly a defective aspect of the genjutsu that never managed to get sentience down. Point being, even Dudders has likes, dislikes and hobbies. It just doesn’t really make a reliable Turing Test, does it?”  Jiraiya understood maybe about half of that, that sort of worried him, but at least judging by dead last’s expression he wasn’t cluing in either. Only the blonde looked like he had any idea what she was saying and judging by his expression he was hoping Lee was going to shut up before Jiraiya got the wrong idea.

“Alright, what would you ask then?”

The girl appeared to think about this quite seriously and then with a smile that could only be described as bright and cheerful she said, “You’re in a desert, walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortoise. It’s crawling towards you, you reach down and flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t. Not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?”

Well, Jiariya thought to himself as the silence stretched on, he now knew what some of those comments in the file had been about. Really, the only thing he can think to answer is that this is why toads are the best summons, not that he has anything against tortoise summons but really…

“Yeah, well, I like my questions better.” Jiraiya finally said, much to the relief of his other two students.

And the silence just kept stretching as it appeared that none of them had anything else to say to each other after… that. Eventually he clapped his hands together, “So, tomorrow we’re going to have a test, if you pass you get to be my genin, if not you all get sent back to the academy! Be at training field seven at six sharp!”

Then, feeling there was no other choice, he shunshined the hell out of there leaving them staring after him and only catching the last words of the girl, “I think I like him.”

* * *

Lee and Minato were the sort of friends that people imagined knew each other from birth or were secretly twins like the Hyuga clan heirs.

They went everywhere together, it was never just Minato or just Lee, but always _MinatoandLee_ no matter where they went or what they were doing. They had their own language and their own way of doing things that made them a unit rather than two separate people.

But they hadn’t always been together.

He still found that hard to think about, hard to remember, because he’d fallen into the trap of _MinatoandLee_ too. So that whenever he thought of time without Lee in it, the time where Lee wasn’t there, it was as if there was a hole in his memory where she should have been.

He didn’t actually meet her though until he was almost five years old.

“Minato-kun,” The matron smiled at him, her hand clutching a smaller paler one in hers, “Could you be a dear and help…” She trailed off looking somewhat bewildered.

Minato stared in confusion as his eyes settled the girl whose hand she was holding. He’d never seen her before, she must be new, because he would remember if he had seen someone like that before.

She looked… foreign. More than him, with his blonde hair. She was pale like some of the clan children but that was about where things stopped being familiar. Her hair was red, not crimson like blood, but brighter. It was the color of early sunsets, before the light had bled to purple, the color of poppies, and the color of autumn leaves just as they’ve turned. It was also large, framing her face in untamed curls, falling down her back and becoming more circular as it went. But that didn’t even get to her eyes, her eyes which were larger and somehow fuller than any eyes he’d ever seen, and were green. Again he found himself thinking of trees, of sunlight filtering through and you could see every shade of green as you looked up.

The girl gave the woman and then Minato a dull, unimpressed, and somewhat impatient look.

Finally she seemed to guess what the matron wanted, she must have only just arrived if the matron didn’t know her name, _“Eleanor Lily Potter”_

Only what came out were three garbled and almost unpronounceable words, (Eranoru Riri Potta… He guessed but even that didn’t really sound… right.)

“Right, well, she doesn’t… speak well. If you could help her and keep her occupied…” The matron trailed off again looking at him hopefully.

Minato wasn’t the oldest but he was near this girl’s age and he was known for being helpful and smart too. Besides, the older orphans wouldn’t want her to hang around anyway. He nodded and the matron gave him a relieved look before smiling down at the little girl, who returned the look with that unchanging unimpressed expression, and then disappeared into some part of the orphanage. 

And then she just stood there.

He was sitting on the floor, reading through one of the books, he’d read it before but sometimes it was nice to be able to reread things. “You can sit here, next to me.”

He grinned at her, she remained unmoving, her expression slowly disappeared and then she was staring at him. For a moment it seemed like she was looking through him, or inside of him, and that she could somehow see every thought that was ticking through his head.

He patted the ground next to him, her eyebrows raised, but she seemed to understand the gesture because with an oddly fluid grace (no stiffening in her legs as if they were boneless) she sat cross legged across from him looking at him with… expectation.

He grinned back at her, trying desperately not to feel so uncomfortable, she looked even younger than he did after all.

“I’m Minato.” He finally said.

“Minato…” She repeated, except slower, almost tasting the syllables as they came out, not even bothering to attach a _san_ or _kun_ onto the end.

“Right, and your name is…” He trailed off, taking a breath, before trying it out himself, “Eranoru Riri Potta?”

(The Eranoru clan had bizarre taste in names, wherever she came from, and had made it a terrible length…)

She blinked, a swift deliberate motion, one that made him think of blinds on a window, and then corrected, _“Ellie.”_

And again, it wasn’t quite right, but he guessed, “Eru Lee?”

She shrugged, he smiled, and it became good enough.

He didn’t think about it then, and he didn’t really think about it later until they had entered the academy, but somehow that moment had been it. There wasn’t a buildup, wasn’t a period where he taught her his language and she taught him hers, there wasn’t an awkward phase, they just were.

He knew her, even then, he’d somehow looked at her, through her, and known exactly who she was.

And she’d done the same.

It probably should have worried him more than it did, that suddenly everything became Lee, but Lee was large in a way that other orphans weren’t. She was large and complicated, you could keep peeling back layers of her and always find something underneath the underneath.

Lee was an idiot, Lee was a genius, Lee believed outrageous things that no one else believed, and sometimes she believed in them so much that he thought she must be right.

It’d taken time for her to get conversation down but Lee always learned things she thought were important relatively quickly. Everything else she just didn’t bother with, Lee was always practical that way.

“I come from a village called _Surrey_ , outside of _London_ , in the nation of _England_.” It’d been a few months, enough time so that she wasn’t talking in fragments anymore, and she didn’t substitute her own English words for ones she didn’t know in his language.

They’d been sitting outside in the yard, in the shade of a tree while everyone else played, and he’d finally asked where it was that Lee came from and why she had come to Konoha. At first he’d just assumed she was from somewhere in the Land of Fire, except a weird part of it that he’d never heard of, but then he’d never heard of anyone speaking different languages before. So wherever she was from, it had to be much further than Fire Country’s borders.

He also hadn’t asked because he didn’t like talking about his past either; about the family he no longer had. It was getting harder to remember them, they kept fading out of his thoughts, and one day he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to remember them at all. Already he wasn’t sure what color his mother’s eyes had been.

Lee wasn’t like that though, she never took being an orphan personally, to her it was more like a fact that she couldn’t change. Like her hair being red, it just was, there was no point thinking about it or wondering what if.

“We don’t really have shinobi there, or anywhere really.” Lee admitted with a shrug looking somewhat thoughtful as she made her way through her own memories and impressions, “I didn’t get out much so I didn’t get much of a chance to look but I think I would have heard about it if it was a thing, you know. Bruce Lee’s probably the closest thing I’ve seen to one and I don’t think he could jump across buildings.”

For a moment she considered Bruce-san, probably thinking back on what he’d been able to do and what she’d seen from ninja in the village, but quickly enough just shrugged once again and moved on, “Anyway, about my getting here, well that’s sort of a long story. My parents died before I can remember things clearly, when I was a year old, in a car accident. My aunt’s family took me in and I have, well had I guess, to pay off the debt for the car so I work as an indentured servant. Which, it’s not always bad, but let me tell you vacuuming and weeding get really old really fast.”

Again she shrugged as if this was ultimately unimportant and now irrelevant although her expression had darkened at the thought of weeding.

“They always kept threatening to send me to the orphanage and one day I guess I just decided it was time to see what all the fuss was about. And that’s how I ended up in Konoha and met you.”

“How did you get in?” Minato asked, because Konoha was a hidden village, you had to at least immigrate in.

“ _Teleported_.” Lee said with a shrug then seeing his face explained, “Appeared out of nothingness.”

When she saw his confusion she added again, “Reality’s not always consistent, Minato.”

“I’ve never heard of any of those places.” Minato finally said, somewhat stunned because while he wasn’t an expert he would have thought something would be familiar, but even the name of the country sounded different from all the others. England, what did that mean?

“Well, I’d never heard of Konoha or the Land of Fire either, so I guess we’re even.” Lee paused before adding, “Besides, _England’s_ boring anyway, nothing interesting ever happened there.”

He was glad, in a way, because if it had been anyone else they might have tried to get home and it became more and more difficult to imagine Lee going back to England. By the time they entered the academy, when they were six, the thought was nearly inconceivable.

Because by then _MinatoandLee_ was already in motion and unstoppable.

And years later, after having graduated from the academy and meeting their jonin sensei, _MinatoandLee_ was still in motion and still unstoppable and Matsuda Haru seemed horrified.

Minato felt kind of bad about that, but, well… There wasn’t much he could do.

He’d hoped that one of his other friends, the ones that didn’t necessarily understand Lee but could sort of handle her, would have been placed with them but Shikaku, Inoichi, and Chozu had all been placed together, Fugaku was not only older but also only vaguely tolerated them at best, and the Hyuga twins had also graduated earlier and only vaguely tolerated her at best. Lee sort of terrified everyone else.

“So, ramen?” Minato asked, when the leaves left by their sensei’s hasty retreat had settled.

“Ramen.” Lee agreed.

They both turned to Haru, he said nothing, just sort of whimpered. Lee took that as a yes.

“So, dead last, I don’t think I’ve ever actually talked to you.” Lee started when they’d made their way to the booth, Lee already quickly making her way through the pork ramen. Minato winced at the name, Lee was notoriously bad at names, she remembered his but everyone else’s was a bit iffy.

“Um, well, no.” He looked nervous, if Minato could remember right Haru had at one point talked to Lee, but it had probably been in the middle of a taijutsu spar where Lee had shouted “shield no jutsu” and caused him to hit against the very painful chakra shield that Lee sometimes created.

Not that Lee had to shout the names of her jutsus, or do hand seals, or do any of the things Minato and the rest of them had to do. They called him a genius but sometimes he really wondered because if he was a genius then what the hell did that make Lee?  

Lee seemed indifferent to this, cataloguing Haru away as boring and unimportant, and instead focused on eating while her eyes drifted back over to the front of the shop. Haru had had a moment to prove himself interesting, in Lee’s eyes he’d squandered it.

“So, Haru-kun, now that we’re team mates we should actually get to know each other more.” Minato interrupted when the silence began to stretch too long and became far too awkward. Lee was great but when it came to people it was best that Minato took the lead.

They’d divided up their super team dynamic before ninja had even come recruiting to the orphanage. Lee would be long distance, reality defying, badasss jutsus. Minato would be badass taijutsu as well as ninjutsu master (because you can never have enough ninjutsu) and Minato would be responsible for all of the talking and meeting with people.

That’s why Minato was the one who was going to become Hokage and Lee was just going to be around and be intimidating.

“…We already did the likes and dislikes thing.” Haru pointed out.

“I agree, no point in rehashing information. I think we should strategize.” Lee said, an unholy flash in her green eyes as if she’d just had a very good idea, but probably also a very destructive idea.

“Strategize?” Haru asked, his face paling.

“The guy who sleeps all the time says it’s very important to strategize.” Lee said with a look of importance before slipping into a more casual mode as she ate her noodles, “And besides, I really don’t think I could handle another semester at the academy. So, we must win, we must be victorious at all costs!”

“Not all costs, right?” Minato clarified, because when Lee said all costs she tended to mean all costs, but the Will of Fire was burning bright in Lee’s eyes and when that happened there was nothing anyone could do or say to stop it.

They would pass simply because Lee willed it to be, that’s the way things always worked, and Minato had learned not only to live with it but thrive with it.

This was what they were _MinatoandLee_ forever turning the word to their favor with nothing more than the Will of Fire and an ungodly amount of chakra.

* * *

Eleanor Lily Potter, also known as Ellie, also known now as Lee was trapped in a giant illusion that had stretched itself too thin and was the patchiest thing she’d ever seen. Of course, no one realized it, so perhaps the thing didn’t even have to try and maybe she was just giving it a hard time. Still, Lee figured if she was going to make a giant false reality she would at least have the decency to make it halfway consistent.

However, after about half a year or so, half a year where she didn’t have to vacuum or weed or sleep in a cupboard Lee figured that she didn’t really mind it all that much, the genjutsu. Fake reality was far more interesting than Little Whinging, and besides, Little Whinging hadn’t even been real either, had been less real in many ways than this place.

Fake, but interesting, that’s what she decided Konoha was.

And Konoha had Minato, which Surrey had never had, and for that Lee was perfectly content to sit in a half-baked illusion for eternity.

And she had, she did, and like it’d promised in the beginning with its foreign language and unreadable signs the world was still interesting. When they were six they’d entered the shinobi academy, learned how to warp reality and kill things with knives so that they could become great ninja, and now they had graduated and were about to become genin.

Konoha was very sensible when it came to education, you started at six ended at around twelve. This was much better than England where she would have had to rot in the civilian academy until she was seventeen, which this was better than the cupboard, but when she had other alternatives just seemed like a complete waste of her time.

And if you were good enough, you could move up through the ranks fairly quickly.

Luckily, she and Minato were very good.

She’d always been good at this sort of thing, probably because she seemed to be the only one who realized that reality was something that was easily manipulated. Someone out there was already doing it, badly, and so moving a few strings here and there didn’t disrupt the illusion as a whole. Chakra wasn’t the point, chakra wasn’t even the tip of the iceberg, chakra didn’t have anything on her.

Minato didn’t quite have her knack but he tried hard and he was much quicker than anyone else in the academy. This apparently was enough to get him labeled as a genius, which was a bit much in Lee’s opinion because he was good but not that good, and get both him and her graduated and onto the same team.

But that was unimportant at the moment.

Because right now they were at training field seven, watching as their jonin sensei explained the test that would either allow them to become genin, or send them crawling back to the academy.

And Lee was not going back to the academy.

People looked weird in fake reality, at first it’d sort of bothered her but after enough years she’d learned more or less to get over it, besides weird was interesting and interesting was much better than cupboards.

Their sensei wasn’t too far away from the norm, but his white hair and the red markings under his eyes were certainly distinctive. She’d decided that she liked him, he smiled a lot and actually meant it, which was more than most of her chunin instructors had bothered to do. More, he had this aura of power about him that made it seem like he actually knew what he was doing, which frankly was more than a little refreshing, “Alright, squirts, here’s the deal. If you manage to get a bell by noon I’ll pass you, if not, straight back to the academy. But notice, there’s only two bells and there’s three of you.”

Lee had noticed that, looking to the side she saw that Minato and older dead last had noticed it as well.

She really hadn’t been expecting something so easy. She didn’t know what she’d been expecting, but something a little more dangerous or difficult, maybe playing tag with kunai or something. Bells just didn’t seem all that lethal, then again things were always surprising her, it was part of Konoha’s charms.

Either way she now had two options.

One, win in the first few minutes and hand one bell to Minato and one to her and leave dead last to go back to the academy. This was all well and good, but dead last probably wouldn’t take that too well, not to mention Minato would feel bad about it for days and would probably end up becoming friends with dead last to make up for it. That’s what Minato did with people she offended too much, he made friends with them, and then Lee had to learn how to talk with them since they were around all the time.

She was still getting used to the last batch, she didn’t need a new one to deal with.

The second option was a little more risky, in that he could send them all back any way, but was less likely to have any long term effects like friendship. The goal, namely, was to impress him and judging by the look on his face she could tell his bar was set very low. Overwhelm him so much with their awesomeness that he had no choice but to take them on as genin.

He had that distinctly chunin look, the one the academy instructors got, where it said, “I know what I’m doing, I’ve done this a thousand times, and I know you aren’t going to get it right away because I didn’t.”

He thought that none of them were going to get a bell.

Well, option two it was then.

The man finished his explanation, tied the bells to his uniform, and beamed at them, “Well, squirts, start whenever you’re ready.”

Before he’d even stopped speaking she’d summoned the bells to her, grabbed Minato and dead last, gave Jiraiya sensei a cheery grin and salute before teleporting back to her own apartment and leaving him to stare open mouthed at the dust they left behind.

He found them eventually, sitting on top of Tobirama’s carved head on the Hokage monument and drinking tea while staring into the sunset, but judging by his embarrassed and somewhat irritated expression they’d given him a good run for his money.

However, unlike some of her academy instructors he appeared to get over himself fairly quickly, “I guess you all pass.”

And that was how Lee, Minato, and dead weight became Jiraiya’s genin.


	2. D Ranks: The Clone Wars

_In which the D-rank situation becomes untenable, Minato and Lee eat what is no doubt a ridiculously unhealthy amount of ramen, and Jiraiya witnesses drastic measures the likes of which he’s never seen._

* * *

Lee was very familiar with her D-ranks.

Although she hadn’t known it she had been acquainted with D-rank missions nearly all of her life. The Dursleys just had never bothered to actually call them that, in retrospect they hadn’t referred to them as anything, there was just that order to “get to it, girl” and if she didn’t get to it fast enough she was thrown back into her cupboard for being an ingrate.

The Dursleys were very fond of asking her to jump and expecting her to respond ‘how high’, only non-verbally because the Dursleys also didn’t approve of talking back.

Still, things like pulling weeds, cleaning gutters, walking Aunt Marge’s terrifying dogs without somehow getting eaten, vacuuming while Dudders was watching television, cooking breakfast, and basically everything and anything that apparently fell under the category of D-rank she’d done pretty much every day of her life while she’d lived in Surrey.

What no one had bothered to tell them in the academy was that genins were D-ranks’ little bitches. If they had then no one would ever in their right mind want to be a genin and your only hope once you were a genin was that your sensei took pity on you and gave you some C-ranks and that you passed your chunin exams quickly.

No one had said, either, that apparently using jutsus to make everything go faster and just generally be more efficient was also cheating.

“I don’t understand.” Lee’s arms were filled with the demon howling cat that went by the name of Tora, which had apparently been plaguing Konoha since its founding and possibly before (which was a major sign if there was any that Konoha was in some bizarre fake reality), and belonged to the fire daimyo.

The cat had put up a good fight, for about two seconds before Lee had summoned it to her with the very handy and infinitely useful ‘grabbing no jutsu’ that she’d developed long before she even knew what a jutsu was.

So what had been slated to take all morning had taken about two seconds; this was after the first three D-ranks which were also supposed to have taken all morning and had also only taken about two seconds each. After the third time stepping into the hokage’s office for a D-rank the old man had started to stare at their sensei with a very odd expression on his face.

Their sensei had apparently just reached his limit, “You can’t just use ninjutsu for everything. There’s going to come a day where your… grabbing jutsu… isn’t going to work and you’re going to have to try something else.”

“Then I’ll use a different jutsu.” Lee said, because if there was anything she’d learned over the years it was that there was an infinite number of jutsus and chances were she could develop one on the fly to help the situation. As if in agreement to that sentiment the angry cat let out a howl and continued its struggles for freedom.

“No, you’re missing the point, squirt.” The man sighed, running a hand through thick and spiky white hair, “Alright, pop quiz, why do we do D-ranks?”

Lee blinked at him, she actually had no real idea, her best guess was that somebody had to do it and since the jonin weren’t doing it and the chunin weren’t doing it that meant the genin had to do it because there was nobody lower on the ninja totem pole.

However, Lee had been around long enough to know that probably wasn’t the answer that the man was looking for. The last time she’d given an answer like that, in her history essay on why the Shodaime hokage Senju Hashirama was the greatest hokage ever, she’d just written ‘because my textbook said so’ until it’d filled up a page. She’d failed the essay and had detention for failing to grasp the Will of Fire (which she’d learned was something akin to the True Spirit of Christmas and was a truly baffling concept which she still didn’t quite get).

Ninjas, as a rule, never straight out asked you what they wanted or expected you to return with the real answer. They were all about underneath the underneath as it went.

So Lee went for her bag of will of fire words that usually got Minato better grades on essays than her, “Teamwork.”

“…Well, that’s actually sort of right.” Their sensei said, looking somewhat stunned that she’d managed to give him what he wanted, but then his eyes narrowed, “Wait a minute, why teamwork?”

“Because my comrades are important… And doing petty tasks like catching rabid cats aids in the glory of Konoha.” This apparently, judging by his expression, wasn’t the right answer to his question so Lily tacked on the only thing that might save her, “And the will of fire.”

This apparently was also not the right answer and it was at this point in her floundering that Minato decided to save her ass and say what she was supposed to say the entire time.

“We’re learning how to work together as a team to complete various tasks, even ones we don’t necessarily find interesting or see the importance of.” Minato said with a cheery grin, his blinding smile overriding Lee’s own failure to answer.

“Namikaze, good answer. Eru, terrible answer.” Their sensei summarized, pointing at Minato then at Lee in turn.

“Alright, here’s why we do D-ranks. One, you’re not ready for real missions yet, because you’re twelve and tiny. Two, like Minato-kun said you guys need to learn to work together as a team and it’s best to get that down now before you get out in the field and it’s actually important. Three, you have to learn patience and to try out new methods. Now, tell me why you can’t just grab the cat?”

He was looking directly at her, his dark eyes burning, practically daring her to say the incorrect answer, “…The will of fire?”

“Try again.”

Lee closed her eyes and thought about it, truly thought, and let her memories drift to those long ago days when she used to watch television over Dudder’s fat shoulders and learned the various moral values that still sometimes guided her today. Then, all at once, she realized, “Oh, it’s like Karate Kid.”

“Karate Kid?” Jiraiya asked looking a bit stumped at the reference.

“Daniel-san is a dweeby newcomer genin from another village who gets beat up by the various rookies of the years. In order to improve his standing in the academy and not get his ass handed to him he seeks out and manages to convince an old taijutsu master in the area to teach him the ancient art of karate. Unfortunately, instead of teaching him badass jutsu the old man makes him wax his car and paint his fence. Every day it’s _wax on_ and _wax off_ and Daniel-san gets kind of fed up by it, but he eventually realizes that these tedious and petty tasks are actually teaching him taijutsu. This, along with several touchy feely moments, allows Daniel-san to master the crane kick which wins him the academy spar. Although he still has to live with the shame of getting his ass handed to him by small village genin.”

There was a moment of silence before the man said, “…Yes, it’s exactly like that.”

He then clapped his hands together and gave her a somewhat pointed look, “So, you know what you have to do now?”

“… _Wax cars?_ ” Lee asked in English but their sensei just grinned and shook his head.

“Release the cat.”

Unfortunately Lee’s realization did not stop the wave of D-ranks and as they progressed the D-ranks became things that weren’t so easily accomplished such as babysitting or else Inuzuka dog walking (which was all too reminiscent of Aunt Marge’s beasts from hell). And after two weeks of nothing but D-ranks Lee called an emergency council meeting in her and Minato’s shared apartment.

(On leaving the orphanage, after becoming genin, she and Minato had looked at their meager earnings and decided that if they wanted to have ramen on a nightly basis and make sure it wasn’t instant it would be best if they just shared an apartment.

Lee thought this was a perfectly sensible solution and Minato didn’t seem too bothered.

Their landlord seemed strangely uncomfortable with the situation and whenever she or Minato left would always stare at them silently with a particularly twisted expression on his face.)

The relatively expensive tea was steaming in cups, the ramen had been purchased and placed in front of them, and behind them a map of the elemental nations loomed in large. This was where and how all of their greatest and most life altering decisions were made and though the village might never realize their significance it was clear to both Minato and her that these moments were what decided the fate of the village.

“Comrade Minato, something must be done about the D-rank stagnation, the situation is insupportable.”

Comrade Minato said nothing, instead stared across at her with that stony sober expression he only gained in the most serious of circumstances, and instead sipped his tea as he thought over the severity of the situation.

“Jiraiya-sensei has assured us that after we have progressed through a number of D-ranks we will have a C-rank mission.” Minato mused but even as he said it the fact that they were having this meeting made it more than clear that the possibility of a C-rank was not enough.

“I suggest we resort to drastic measures.” Lee said, meeting Minato’s eyes, and watching as they hardened and became sharp as kunai at her words. For drastic measures truly were drastic and they had only called on them rarely in the past.

“I suggest we release the clones.”

Both fell into strained silence after her words, the shadows seemed to grow more stark, the electric light dimmed, and the room seemed to warp as if the genjutsu was pulling it apart from the corners and stretching it thin.

“Perhaps, Comrade Lee, before we resort to such actions we might call in the consultants. There may be angles we have yet to consider, opportunities we’ve overlooked.”

Between the two of them, between Minato and Lee, there rarely were paths they overlooked. If there were it was for lack of knowledge and resources. She knew, that he knew, that they may be forced to paths they would rather not take regardless of the advice of others. Still, this was why there was a council, this was why it was Minato and Lee and not just Lee alone in a cupboard.

If he had an idea that was different than hers, even if it didn’t work, she would take it.

* * *

If anyone asked Nara Shikaku what he thought about Namikaze Minato he would remind them that to know Minato one must first know Lee. When they asked him about Eru Lee he would give them the shortest response he could possibly think of, “Troublesome.”

Of course, that was the short answer, the long answer was more complicated.

When he’d told his father, the clan head, he’d started as simply as he could, “As clever and unmotivated as a Nara, as crazy and overpowered as an Uchiha, and as charismatic as an Uzumaki.”

This, too, only brushed on the surface of what she was. When she and Minato had first arrived from the orphanage he had not expected to be interested. But they had been interesting, from the very beginning. The two were inseparable, no not inseparable, they complimented each other and worked together like a well-oiled machine even at the age of six.

When Minato had gone out of his way to befriend him, had labeled Shikaku as someone worth knowing, he had explained it in his own words, “We work better together. Lee masters the jutsus first and notes all the details. I’m the one who puts it together to find the larger picture. She’s the fire that blazes and I’m the shadow that stretches behind.”

Hokage, he hadn’t said it then, not the title itself but he had spoken of the fire and the shadow.

And she did, her eyes (her green so green he had almost wondered if it was a dojutsu because human eyes didn’t look like that) would flicker quickly through a room and would seem to take in everything and anything, cataloguing and dissecting in a way that he had only assumed Naras did.

She focused on what she felt she needed to and disregarded the rest; was pragmatic almost to a fault but made up for it with her ridiculous ability to master any jutsu on the first try. In any given class either Shikaku or Lee or both of them would be sleeping through the lecture.

And when she spoke, when she simply stood in room, it was as if there was nothing in it but her and you were forced to stare at her and think of nothing else but her and what she was planning or else doing, all while Minato stood slightly to like a calmer and more distant star.

But this also gave the wrong impression. Because Minato too was very charismatic, drew people in and forced them to stare and acknowledge him. When he smiled it felt as if the sun had just moved out from behind the clouds and there was warmth bubbling up from your stomach. He was a softer more welcoming glow, something you could almost comprehend, something that drew you in.

Together they were this overwhelming force of charisma against which you could not look away and could not say no.

And that was how, in short, Shikaku had ended up befriending the pair.

It occasionally got him into troublesome, if somewhat interesting, situations.

“We’ve gotten a fair share of D-ranks too.”

It was the first time they’d really sat down to talk after graduation and of course they were doing it over bowls of ramen. When one was dealing with Minato and Lee one had best be prepared to eat ramen, of course they were paying for it so he wasn’t really going to complain, but for once he couldn’t help but wonder if they wouldn’t settle for barbeque instead.

“All genin get D-ranks, it’s all we’re really qualified for.” Shikaku said with a shrug, it was troublesome but it was also temporary so there was no real point in getting upset over it.

“Please, I am the master of D-ranks.” Lee said, that insistent purely Lee expression on her face, the one you didn’t dare to contradict. “I am overqualified for D-ranks; Minato is overqualified for D-ranks. The only one remotely qualified is Dead Last.”

“Haru-kun.” Minato interjected, not that Shikaku cared since the closest Lee had ever gotten to remembering his own name was Lazy Nara.

“Right, so, what exactly was it you needed advice with?” Shikaku asked, deciding to get to the point, because it was at this point that things always got interesting.

Back in the academy, whenever Lee wasn’t involved in some sort of madness, he’d convince her to play shogi with him. She always began in an appalling manner, taking very known and easily predicted moves that almost guaranteed him victory. It was when you got to the endgame or sometimes even midgame that her strange turns in logic would surface and the game would veer in directions he had disregarded much earlier on.

Once you dug past the formalities, past the pretense, Lee would make things more than worth your time.

“We need a way to do D-ranks efficiently and painlessly until our sensei finally hands us a C-ranked mission.” Lee summarized, her expression reminiscent of those only worn by people in positions of high command.

She held up a single hand and as she spoke began to lift fingers, “Unfortunately there appear to be a few conditions. One, we can’t simply invent a jutsu to solve the task within a very short amount of time. It has to take the same amount of time that it would take Dead Last to do, since he’s useless. Two, we have to work together as a team meaning that Dead Last has to carry his dead weight in whatever we’re doing so that we can say we learned things. Three, the jonin sensei can’t catch on that we’re attempting to solve the matter in the most efficient and painless way possible and has to be utterly convinced that we are trying our hardest to benefit the glory of Konoha.”

Eru Lee might not bother to remember his name, too troublesome for her which in itself was troublesome for him, but she always did manage to wrap up situations which seemed banal (such as having many D-ranks as genin) into a game of strategy that he would enjoy solving.

In the earlier years of his friendship with Minato and Lee he might wonder if this was something he should encourage. D-ranks were an important part of the village, they bridged the gap between civilian and shinobi and assured villagers that shinobi weren’t simply merciless killers. They also were designed to ease genin into the shinobi lifestyle, into completing missions and following orders, as well as working together as a team.

However, Lee, in her own way, was actually seeking to perfect the art of D-rank missions. She was showing initiative and creativity in how she approached a problem and this was something that would be commended in any chunin or jonin. She was still completing the mission, still seeking to follow mission parameters, she was simply forcing it into a less troublesome state for the team.

And there was the fact that Shikaku was just there to give advice and if she didn’t like what he said she’d just disregard him and do what she wanted anyway. So it was best to play along with these sorts of things and see what trouble it landed the pair into this time.

“Who’s your jonin sensei?” Shikaku asked, his eyes flicking to Minato as it was unlikely that Lee actually remembered the name.

“Jiraiya.”

In other words one of the most highly respected jonin in the village, recently dubbed one of the sannin for his fight with Hanzo in Ame towards the end of the war.

“Well, that makes things a little more difficult.” Shikaku said musing over the ramen, “If it was anyone else I’d suggest one of your genjutsus and then use whatever jutsu you want to complete the task but I doubt that’s going to work on a jonin of that caliber and even attempting it might lengthen the period you have D-ranks for.”

It would certainly piss off Shikaku if he was a jonin and some brat tried to do it to him.

“Any other ideas?” Minato asked as Lee thought over her genjutsus and how far she could stretch them.

“Nothing immediately comes to mind.” He said with a shrug, although it was an interesting problem it might just end up being easier to simply do the D-ranks and suffer through it, that was what he, Inoichi, and Chozu had chosen to do after all.

“Thank you for your services, Comrade Shikaku.” Minato said when it became clear that Shikaku had nothing else to offer, and in a single motion he and Lee rose from the table, gave Shikaku a pair of shallow dignified bows, and then walked off leaving Shikaku in the middle of the ramen shop wondering what disaster ANBU was going to have to deal with this time.

Because the one thing he’d learned, from the last time he’d played advisor Comrade Shikaku to Minato and Lee, was that it somehow always wound up being ANBU’s problem.

* * *

Kushina wasn’t about to say it out loud but she was jealous of everyone else. Everyone else who had graduated had been placed on genin teams and even though they all had to do D-ranks they still saw each other every day and trained together.

Being an apprentice, even to someone as great as Uzumaki Mito and who was also one of the few people left who she was related to, was sometimes pretty lonely. She thought about Uzushio too much in those moments, about the home that… didn’t exist anymore and all of the family she didn’t have.

Whirlpool princess, how could you be princess of something that didn’t even exist?

But there were certain things she was never going to say out loud. That was one of them.

The other one was admitting that back in her academy days, when she and Eru Lee had declared war against each other after Kushina had told her that Minato was too flakey and pretty to be hokage, Kushina had handily gotten her ass handed to her and was never going to live down the shame of being out pranked by someone who didn’t even appear to understand what pranking was.

“Namikaze Minato will be hokage.”

It was the first thing Lee ever said to her and she said it as if she was writing these things into reality, carving this future out for Minato right then and there, and that there was nothing in all of the world that could stop it from happening.

But Kushina didn’t have time then to think about how Lee said it, how different it was than Kushina’s own grin and loud words, shouting at the top of her lungs, “I will be hokage! Believe it.”

Because Lee was still talking then and Minato was watching her out of the corner of his eye, waiting for their next move, because Minato and Lee always worked and functioned together, “What do you have that he doesn’t?”

“I’m not flakey.” Kushina had said, and she wasn’t, at the time she was just thinking how Minato wasn’t even bothering to defend himself. He was just sitting there next to Lee, smiling, and looking like he wanted to write the whole thing off (it’d probably have been less embarrassing if he had succeeded.)

“I don’t think I’m flakey either. I can’t really help being pretty.” Minato said, his cheeks reddening into a healthy flush that almost matched the color of Kushina’s hair.

“Anything besides Minato’s pretty face?”

And then Kushina had paused, because she didn’t know, she’d just said it because she was the one who wanted to be hokage and she didn’t need competition right after she’d said it. Not when she was alone in a foreign country, with red (too red) hair, and a face that apparently looked like a tomato. She’d just said it and then she’d had to back it up when this pretty blonde boy had said that he wanted to be hokage too.

Because you couldn’t have two hokage.

So Kushina said the only thing she could think of, “I’m a genius at pranking, believe it!”

And without hesitation, without even blinking, Lee’s face contorted into a strangely fox like grin and she said, “I bet we can do it better.”

“No one beats an Uzumaki at pranking!” Kushina said, because it was true, there were a few things Uzumaki did better than anyone else: ramen eating, pranking, and expressing their nindo.

“If a hokage has the right resources he can do anything. Between me and Minato there’s nothing we can’t do. So I bet, between Minato and I, that we can beat you at pranking and you’ll have to admit that one day Namikaze Minato is going to be hokage.”

Before Kushina had even blinked she’d been dragged over to Nara Shikaku where they’d decided on the rules of their competition. They would have a month to perform as many pranks as possible, they could delegate to whoever they wanted and use any ninja techniques at their disposal, the winner would be declared by which of them ended up with longer academy, police, or even ANBU records for the mayhem they caused around the village.

Kushina had started with their academy instructor by placing an eraser over the door and watching as it fell and glued onto his head.

Lee had started by infesting ANBU headquarters with giant, pink, sparkling creatures she called unicorns that, after escaping, paraded through the streets for two days until the Uchiha force managed to capture them all.

Kushina had upped her game to paint the Hokage monument painting on geisha make up onto Senju Tobirama in the greatest work of art she’d done to date.

Lee had invented a jutsu that canceled gravity in the hokage tower and left everyone inside floating around trying to sort the floating paperwork only to exit through a window and find gravity reasserting itself.

It was at this point that Kushina realized she would have to do quantity over quality and decided to enlist Uchiha Mikoto and together they would pull multiple pranks at the academy in any given day but as her pranks increased in mass somehow Lee’s did too.

At the end Kushina’s academy record was as thick as a book. Lee’s ANBU record filled an entire cabinet.

What she hadn’t realized was that Lee had only been acting as the shinobi, as that which carried out the mission, it was Minato who had designed the plan and strategized. On her own Lee didn’t seem to even understand what a prank was or what the goal of it was, she did daily pranks almost unintentionally just by existing, but Minato did and so he was the one that guided.

Minato still might be a little too pretty looking to be hokage but Kushina had learned to respect them or at least respect them as a pair. And they must have learned to respect her too, maybe even become friends with her, because every once in a while Minato and Lee would show up out of the blue and offer to pay for her ramen in exchange for a conversation.

She was still closer with Mikoto than she was Minato and Lee but she liked to think they were friends and that if she really wanted to she could go up and talk to them and feel like a team like everyone else.

So she was secretly really pleased that they had invited her for lunch, even if she didn’t say it.

“So you guys have got D-rank problems?” Kushina asked rhetorically, grinning over at them as if that was all too bad and not her problem because apprentices didn’t have D-ranks like the rest of them. Well, Kushina did have to learn how to mix ink and chakra, and practice her calligraphy, but it wasn’t the same thing.

Minato and Lee nodded solemnly in unison, sometimes they got on the same wavelength, usually when they were about to do something awesome and spectacular, and would do things in perfect unison with each other.

“If I had _half-pence_ for every garden I’ve ever weeded then I would be able to afford a thousand bowls of ramen.” Lee said with a wistful sigh, her hands doing that erratic gesture thing they always did when Lee was getting emotional.

“Well, my answer to any problem, is that nothing can’t be solved with a good prank.” Of course, this wasn’t true, there were deeper and darker problems that couldn’t be solved with laughter and jokes but Lee and Minato weren’t asking about those problems.

D-ranks were simple in comparison to that.

Lee made a face at this, after the month of pranking had ended Lee had more or less abandoned the cause, which was really just too bad because Kushina could swear that somewhere in Lee’s family there must be an Uzumaki because she was just too good and had too much of a taste for ramen to just be an orphan.

(That and, whenever she saw the color red, Lee’s hair, she couldn’t help but feel that it would be truly nice if there was another Uzumaki besides she and Mito somewhere.)

“Like what?”

“Flakey as always Minato,” Kushina said with a smile, not really meaning it, and with great bravado relayed her expertise, “Prank your sensei, prove to him that you’re so awesome that you can do D-ranks and prank him at the same time, and that the longer you do D-ranks the more prankings he’s going to get. That way he has to give in and give you a C-rank, believe it!”

“That actually might work.” Lee said slowly, blinking, processing Kushina’s words and Kushina didn’t have to fake the smile that appeared on her face because of it.

“Of course it will work, it was my idea, and my ideas are awesome!”

The pair had nothing to say to that but they didn’t deny it, didn’t mention anything about her hair, and on the whole took her quite seriously like her opinion was something that should be valued and held in high esteem.

“Thank you, Comrade Kushina, for the advice.” Minato said with an appreciative smile.

She just grinned as the pair stood in unison, offered her a small bow like they would to the princess of a village, and then walked out of the ramen stand without looking back. Sometimes, she thought to herself when she had spent too long on calligraphy and explosive seals, she wondered if she couldn’t have been on that team with the pair of them.

* * *

If anyone asked Sakumo, which several had on multiple occasions, then he had no idea how he had got involved with the kids or why he stayed involved. Sometimes, he’d say with a grin, it was to mitigate damage, sometimes it was for recruitment purposes, but sometimes he would honestly admit that he just liked them.

Eru Lee and Namikaze Minato were the oddest, most charismatic, and frankly bizarre children he’d ever met in his life and he liked it. To be honest he didn’t even really want them in ANBU, they’d do well, the girl would be devastating, but that was always why he hesitated to suggest her.

She might do a little too well and there were certain factions in ANBU that would take advantage of that. He didn’t want to see her lose that bright spark in her eyes or the friendship that tethered her to the boy.

Because without Minato she could become very dangerous, Minato humanized her, gave her direction and kept her steady. Even with only knowing them in passing, only learning about their existence when Lee had taken an interest in tormenting ANBU, he could tell just by watching them that she needed him.

So Sakumo did his best to keep them out of ANBU, to keep anyone from looking past the aggravation of being glued naked to the ceiling, and had written in very large dark letters over their files to never recruit them.

And every once in a while they’d somehow manage to track him down, usually waiting until he was off-duty to do so (which was nice since somehow, without giving any real explanation, Lee inexplicably knew one ANBU from another and how to find them in any room), and would ask him to join them for ramen and for advice on their latest shenanigans.

Over the years it had mostly been about things in the academy that somehow gotten out of hand, such as Eru Lee’s infamous clone incidents, but they had recently graduated to genin so he was unsure what this new problem would be about.

(Jiraiya, he thought offhandedly, was their jonin sensei. He’d have to ask him what he thought about the pair and how the third child was interacting with them.)

“Oh yes, I remember D-ranks.” That had been a very long time ago though and while he remembered being bitterly frustrated at the time he now felt a twinge nostalgia. The war had been… long, long and brutal, and it made him miss with a tenderness he didn’t know he had the innocence of weeding a garden or else painting a fence.

“Comrade Hatake,” Lee started, and he honestly loved how she said that, the lack of sama or san, but still with the respect in her eyes that she might use to address the hokage, it was somehow refreshing, “You’re a jonin of reputed abilities. How do you suggest we deal with the D-rank situation?”

“Does it need to be dealt with?” He asked, looking at them both, and they were both so cute when they were frustrated, “If I know your sensei, and I do, then he’s perfectly aware of your level and will no doubt ask for a C-ranked mission soon enough.”

As hard as it was to tell straight out of the academy it was no secret that Eru Lee and Namikaze Minato were the next generations’ sannin in the making if not more. They might not have the maturity to be chunin yet but they certainly had the power and Jiraiya would know that.

There was no point in this team doing the average amount of D-ranks. Jiraiya would push them to take the exams soon and for that they would need a certain amount of C-ranks so he doubted their situation would last long.

“Not soon enough, I’ve done my fair share of D-ranks! I have walked dogs, rescued cats, weeded gardens, _vacuumed_ living rooms, cleaned _gutters_ , cooked breakfast, entertained Dudders, and any and every D-rank in between!” Lee said pounding her hand on the counter for emphasis, seeing Sakumo’s confusion (since they’d only been genin for a limited amount of time), Minato explained.

“In Lee’s old village her relatives had her do multiple D-ranks without pay on a daily basis.” Minato then grinned and held up his hands, “Of course, I wouldn’t mind and I’m sure Haru-kun wouldn’t mind if the D-ranks came to an end.”

Hopefully, Sakumo thought as he looked at them, there wouldn’t come a time when they’d long for those D-ranks they threw aside so easily. Being a genin was a time period you never got back, Sakumo was of the opinion that you should enjoy it as much as you could, but of course nobody liked to listen to an old man’s wisdom.

“Well, that’s all very convincing but I’m still of the wait and see tactic. If you’re still doing D-ranks a month from now then come talk to me and we’ll find a more aggressive strategy.” They wouldn’t be, not with Jiraiya as their sensei, but it was still so cute to see them so frustrated about it.

Of course, a frustrated Lee usually meant the Uchiha police force and then ANBU would eventually become involved, but it was a small price to pay and ultimately harmless. Dealing with the aftermath of the pair’s adventures was usually something that could be wrapped up in an afternoon and was fodder for gossip; Minato dutifully kept it from being any more than that.

“Thank you, Comrade Hatake, for your advice and wisdom.” Minato said as the pair stood in unison and offered him a slight bow and he watched as they stepped out of the ramen shop and out onto the street quietly talking in that strange language they’d been speaking since Sakumo had first met them. And as always, after he talked to the pair of them, he felt a smile growing on his face.

“One day,” He confessed to the ramen stand owner, who he knew was more than familiar with the pair’s antics, “I’m going to take either or both of those strange hooligans as my apprentice.”

* * *

“That advice was all terrible!”

“Maybe we’re being too impatient, it’s only been a few weeks, we can last longer if we have to.”

“But if we don’t have to why should we?”

“For the greater good of the village. You know what happened last time.”

“I think I’ve figured out how to fix that, so we should be okay, we’ll do a test run.”

“Are you sure it’s worth the risk?’

“Yes, it’s absolutely clear, we’ve long since passed the point of no return.”

* * *

“I’m Eru Lee and I like painting fences!” The little girl, Lee, grinned up at him in that way only children under the age of five should be able to manage and the air around her seemed to glitter with the force of her enthusiasm.

Beside her, Haru continued to look as mildly disturbed by everything as ever and Minato was strangely sober and stone faced, not even looking at Lee but instead straight at Jiraiya; like he was waiting for Jiraiya to make his move.

The three orphans in Ame, Jiraiya found himself musing, hadn’t been nearly this weird. He didn’t know who Eru Lee reminded him of but he was almost desperate at this point to find some comparison if only so that he could ask someone for advice.

She was like an overly cheerful version of Orochimaru. She didn’t get people, she didn’t get why you did some things and not others, she didn’t understand why relationships were important, and she was also very loyal when she saw the worth in someone else, the way Orochimaru was loyal to the idea of Konoha and to his own teammates. If she said bastard a bit more often, frowned a little more, then she’d be a little miniature copy of him.

But then again, Orochimaru would never in a million years, even brainwashed with the strongest of genjutsus, say what Lee was saying or smile like she smiled. Lee had absolutely no shame in the way Jiraiya had no shame, she grinned with all her teeth and didn’t at all seem concerned with how she was perceived. So maybe Orochimaru was a bad comparison.

“Really, because I thought you hated painting fences?” Jiraiya said, because in the past few weeks Lee had made her opinion about D-ranks more than clear. To be fair, no one enjoyed D-ranks, but that being said everyone had to do them.

Which was why Lee’s about face in attitude was a little… suspicious.

The girl stepped forward, the grin not wavering, and the fires of passion and determination burning in her eyes, “Painting fences is the reason for my entire existence! I paint fences therefore I am! And I like my momentary purposeful existence so I like to paint fences.”

And like Jiraiya eventually did every time Lee opened her mouth for an extended period of time and spouted words he completely ignored everything she said and moved on, “Right, well, you’ll be happy to know we aren’t actually painting fences.”

The girl’s smile vanished and the light dimmed in her eyes, “…Not… Not painting fences? You said we were painting fences.”

“Well, the hokage gave that to someone else, so we’re finding Tora the cat again.” They’d love that, it would get them good exercise, and maybe this time he wouldn’t have to try to explain why everyone did D-ranks. There were two talks you shouldn’t have to do more than once in your life, the sex talk, and the D-rank talk.

Lee didn’t seem to be taking the news well, “But… I… I was made, I was created to paint fences. If I don’t paint fences, then why am I here? Will I ever stop existing if I never paint a fence? Will I be this solid, physical, pointless thing forever?”

The girl then, out of nowhere, had a kunai in her hand before Jiraiya could move she was stabbing herself repeatedly in the neck. He watched in silent horror as blood spurted out of her neck, suddenly not in Konoha anymore but Ame, wretched war torn Ame where the streets were paved in mud and blood and death. Haru was screaming, Minato was moving towards her, and he was just thinking that he had to move had to get her to a medic (if only Tsunade was still there, if only she hadn’t left, because she would know what to do and this couldn’t be happening because he was in Konoha and this didn’t happen in Konoha and…)

And then in the gory mess that was once his kunoichi there was a loud crack and a new, perfectly alive and untouched Eru Lee was standing in front of him, “I’m Eru Lee and I like catching demonic cats!”

(Later, Sarutobi sensei would tell him that he could hear him screaming in terror all the way from the hokage tower.)

* * *

“That is not a clone!”

As usual it had gone too far and ANBU had somehow gotten involved.

After the masked ninja had appeared to investigate Research and Development had shown up to poke at the various corpses with instruments, who were shortly followed by the hokage, and then Orochimaru who was staring at the bodies with undisguised curiousity. And the longer team seven stood there the more people started showing up until the training field, where they had decided to meet before every mission, was overflowing with people.

Their sensei Jiraiya was not taking it well.

This was also what Minato had been hoping to avoid but unfortunately nobody had been convincing enough and this way they also prepared their sensei for some of Lee’s more extravagant solutions. If this had happened on a C-rank mission, on any mission besides a D-rank, then it would be a lot worse than it already was.

He was mitigating the damage as best he could, of course he couldn’t actually tell anyone that as Lee would take it the wrong way, and Jiraiya sensei would be unappreciative but it was true none the less.

That’s what D-ranks were really for, they were practice runs, times to push yourselves and learn when too far was too far. Now was the time for this sort of thing, not later.

“Well, my clones are a little… real.” Lee attempted to explain with a somewhat sheepish look on her face, which for her was a close to an apology for things getting out of hand as anyone was ever going to get.

“A little real? They had chakra signatures, they had heartbeats, they stabbed themselves to death with kunai!” Jiraiya said, waving vaguely towards what was left of Lee’s clones, “Clones don’t do that!”

Lee said nothing for a few moments, simply looked wide eyed and blinking up at Jiraiya, and then said quietly, “I thought I had them under control this time.”

“This time?!”

“All they want is to do their purpose, you give them a simple task and they do it, then they self-destruct and stop existing. That’s it. I thought that way…”

“You thought what?”

“The last time Lee made clones, in the academy, they always tried to kill her and replace her as the real Eru Lee.” Minato filled in for Lee, when she drifted off into silence. They didn’t like to discuss the clone incidents too often, mostly because they had very quickly become very dangerous.

Minato himself had once been held hostage by one of Lee’s clones, luckily Lee’s clones only had issues with Lee and actually liked him just as much as the original Lee did, otherwise Minato might not have survived that day.

Jiraiya took a moment to process that. After standing there in silence for a moment, listening to the mutterings of the hokage and his old teammate, he took a deep breath and appeared to center himself, “Alright, no more clones.”

“No more clones.” Lee repeated with vigorous repentant nodding and then dully added, “I guess this means more D-ranks though, right?”

Then, surprisingly, the man grinned at them, “Nope, we are officially vacationing from D-ranks! We’ll let R and D… clean up your clones… and we’re all going to get some dinner and then a nice, long, exciting C-rank that has nothing to do with dead people.” 

The man then put arms around all of them, somehow being large enough to usher them all forward at once, and moved them away into town and towards the restaurant district. Lee grinned across at Minato and Minato grinned back feeling as if they’d only narrowly dodged a kunai.

If they had had any other instructor, if they had still been in the academy, then he doubted their sensei would have ever forgiven them.

This was going to work, Minato thought to himself, they were going to be a real team.

“But seriously, warn me about stuff like that next time.”


	3. The Worth of Ramen

_In which the hokage and various other parties come to the realization that they finally need to do something about Eru Lee, Lee proves once again that she can do whatever she wants for whatever reason she wants which usually boils down to ramen, and Matsuda Haru comes to the disturbing and somewhat depressing realization that in comparison to Eru Lee and Namikaze Minato he really is dead weight._

* * *

“Sorry we’re late, sensei, I was kidnapped by Kumo-nin.”

“You were what?”

“I was kidnapped by Kumo-nin, then Minato tried to save me, and then we had a fight, and we won, and now there are no more Kumo-nin.”

“I thought we agreed that you brats can’t do things like this to me anymore.”

“Lee actually was kidnapped by Kumo-nin.”

“What?”

“They’re in Konoha’s torture basement right now, I’m pretty sure, I don’t know. ANBU don’t really like saying words or telling you what they’re doing or where they’re taking people. ANBU is a very serious profession for very serious people.”

Staring at his two most problematic, if brilliant, students Jiraiya decided right then and there (if only for causing him the least amount of headaches in any given day) Matsuda Haru was his new favorite student.

* * *

In retrospect it was easy enough to understand how the mistake was made.

Until they took the chunin exams the talents, faces, and names of a village’s genin weren’t generally known. If you were the clan heir then they might know of your existence, your name if they had spies in the right places, but villages in general didn’t care about genin.

Until you made chunin there was no point in keeping an eye on you, not without a kekki genkei. Uchiha, Hyuga, and now Uzumaki: these were the names and faces that other villages would make it their business to know.

Sarutobi Hiruzen spread out the long, too long he’d have to condense it again, file on the twelve year old genin Eru Lee. Clipped to the front was her new graduation photograph which had only been taken a month before, featuring her bright forced grin, her large too green eyes, and her overwhelming mass of red curling hair.

Eru Lee, unknown orphan from an unknown civilian village, possibly one outside of the Land of Fire’s borders (to this day Hiruzen had yet to hear, from anyone other than the girl, about a village named _Surrey_ ). Until the age of five, when the matron of the orphanage had reported finding her on the doorstep speaking gibberish, there was effectively no trace of her.

No father, no mother, no clan, no village, no country, no history, nothing but a strange foreign looking girl in an orphanage who hadn’t even captured the attention of shinobi until a team had been sent to recruit there.

A recent top graduate from the academy, whose progress in ninjutsu without a jonin sensei or a clan was nothing short of genius, but one who had only just recently become a genin and as of yet had taken only D-rank missions inside the village.

To another village Eru Lee effectively did not exist.

So details about her, such as her red hair and her overwhelming chakra reserves, were also effectively nonexistent and irrelevant.

In any other situation, had it been any other little girl, their mistake would not have been disastrous. Red hair was rare, chakra reserves of that size rarer, they had made an assumption and if it had been anyone but Eru they still could have recovered from their blunder and tried again for Uzumaki Kushina.

Fortunately they had been unlucky and they had picked the only twelve year old genin who was able to take down five nin in less than two minutes, crippling all of them, apparently without even bothering to use hand seals.  

But Hiruzen didn’t like relying on things like being lucky or unlucky or for that matter on the untested and undocumented skill of genin. Which was why he had her file spread out in front of him and why he had summoned his two former students to his office.

Jiraiya was clearly uncomfortable, if he was any younger he’d be hopping from one foot to another and demanding that his sensei get to the point already. He’d learned to be patient, patience had been forced upon him, but in the way he crossed his arms and tried to look at anything but Hiruzen it was clear that he found this quiet moment unnerving.

Orochimaru was better at hiding his feelings, as he always was, but there was a certain tenseness to him as well. Not the same worry and concern that Jiraiya had, that emotion that was still plaguing him since he had burst into Hiruzen’s office demanding to know what his students had meant when they said Eru Lee was kidnapped that morning, but he was a little too still and his eyes a little too focused on that brightly colored photograph. Anticipatory, as if this girl was a new puzzle he’d just heard of and now took mild interest in.

And Tsunade… Tsunade was not here and according to Jiraiya’s sources had claimed was losing money left and right through gambling and sake. Tsunade no longer truly belonged to Konoha at all.

“I think at this point it’s more than safe to conclude that Eru Lee has a kekki genkai.” Hiruzen started, watching as Jiraiya’s eyes narrowed and as Orochimaru became even impossibly more still.

“I think it is also safe to conclude that it would be best if she and her team entered the chunin exams as soon as possible.” Hiruzen added, this time actually earning a verbal response from Jiraiya.

“Sensei, you can’t be serious!” Jiraiya said stepping forward and slamming his hand on the table, his eyes blazing, “They’ve only been genin for a month! They haven’t even done a C-rank yet, Minato-kun just started water walking and Haru-kun has only just realized started inching his way up a tree!”

“Teleportation with a range greater than the body flicker technique, an invisible shield of chakra that deflects physical attacks as well as some chakra based attacks, a technique that can pull any object to her regardless of size, makeup, or distance, a new ability that allows her to break kneecaps without hand seals without even touching the body, and the ability to create completely physically realistic clones so that even after their death Tactics and Intelligence could not tell the difference between them and a human body.”

At the sound of each technique Jiraiya’s anger and insistence weakened until finally Hiruzen brought his hands together and continued, “It is no stretch to say these are all A-ranked techniques and each appears to have been invented with little thought and implemented with even less. I will not have an A-ranked genin, Jiraiya.”

For a moment he thought Jiraiya would falter, would give in, but the man had always been stubborn and said, “She’s not ready to lead teams, lead missions, she may have the…”

“Then get her ready, get Namikaze Minato ready, and keep the team together after they pass the exams. I’m not telling you to get rid of them, just to see to it that her taijutsu catches up to her ninjutsu, and that she has a rank befitting of her abilities.” Here he paused, rubbed a hand over his eyes, feeling all at once tired and older than he should, “We are no longer at war, you have almost a year before the exams take place, but if she enters the bingo books with those types of skills before she is ready to be a chunin then we may not be as lucky as we were this morning with Kumo.”

Jiraiya didn’t like it, he didn’t like the idea of pushing these children ahead in the ranks in peacetime. Hiruzen didn’t either but he was older and the hokage, and he knew that with this little talk Jiraiya understood why this was necessary.

She had only done D-ranks up until now, but they would be taking C-ranks soon, and the girl was far from subtle. If another village caught wind of her, knew that she was a genin, then they would deal with her now either through kidnapping as Kumo had tried or through assassination before she could become a true threat.

Jiraiya would see that she, that the boys, were all ready for that.

Hiruzen’s eyes then slid to Orochimaru, “Orochimaru, I would like you to investigate the girl’s kekki genkai. Discover what it is, how it works, what more it’s capable of and what it isn’t, and then train her in it and see that she becomes proficient.”

“Sensei, you can’t just hand my student to Orochimaru!”

“Sensei is the hokage, he can do whatever he pleases.”

Just like when they were genin, Orochimaru proud like a regal prince and Jiraiya frustrated and loud and stubborn, sometimes he felt they argued just for the sake of arguing. All they needed was Tsunade bashing in Jiraiya’s head for peeping at the local woman’s bathhouse.

“First, although I am hokage I can hardly do whatever I please.” His life would be much easier if that were the case, “Second, I am not handing Orochimaru your student, he is merely borrowing her.”

“Well he can’t borrow her either!”

What Jiraiya left unsaid, although what hung in the air, was that he did not believe Orochimaru could be trusted with children. It wore at him that he also was not sure if he would trust Orochimaru with children, it was why he had hesitated to give him a genin team when he had given one to Jiraiya.

But this was not about whether or not Orochimaru could handle a genin team or an apprentice.

“We have a first generation kekki genkai in the village, Jiraiya. Orochimaru is the best suited in all of Konoha for the task and you can’t argue that he will do it well.”

And Jiraiya couldn’t, it looked as if he was trying but he couldn’t, because Orochimaru had become the best they had when it came to jutsu research and development. And more personally it gave Orochimaru a way to connect back to the village, to the village’s future, this would be good for him as it would be good for the girl.

Neither of them appeared to have anything worth saying to that, or if they did then Hiruzen’s intimidating hat was doing its job and telling them to sit down shut up and do what they’re told for once.

“Good, it’s settled then, off to work and leave me to the rest of this dreaded paperwork I have to fill out on a daily basis.”

* * *

There was quite a lot of needless buildup, in Lee’s opinion, the first time she met Orochimaru after she had been sort of kidnapped by Kumo.

She said sort of kidnapped because they hadn’t gotten very far, only just outside of the village gate, and even though Minato had come running outside to rescue her it had really only lasted about maybe about ten minutes. Then ANBU had shown up, ushered them back inside the village, and she and Minato had walked over to the training field where Jiraiya and Dead Last were waiting.

For a kidnapping it was rather anticlimactic and really not even worth mentioning to anyone.

Still, afterwards she had the feeling that their sensei took it quite a bit more seriously than she did, as he’d started upping his game when it came to training. Minato too, was more sober afterwards for a while, spending time thinking and realizing that Konoha’s walls weren’t as impenetrable as he’d thought.

And more, it was after the kidnapping that she was brought to meet Orochimaru in his lab.

“Alright, Lee-chan, here we are.”

Funny, because standing outside the building Jiraiya still hadn’t let go of her hand. He had a rather stupid grin on his face but that didn’t mean anything, ninja had a tendency to use other extravagant emotions to cover up what they were really feeling. So giant grin could mean happiness but it also could mean that Jiraiya was not pleased at all.

Lee usually wasn’t the one to figure out what the actual emotion was, that sort of exhausting work was best left to Minato, so at this point all she could do was note that sensei’s smile was a little too cheerful to actually be a smile.

Lee didn’t see what the deal was because as far as she was concerned she didn’t need to see Orochimaru at all. So if Jiraiya was going to get fussy over letting her go then she might as well not go, she’d even pointed that out to Jiraiya on the way over, but he’d instead just said something cryptically about it being out of his hands and over his head. Either way Lee had no intense desire to see the only man who was paler than her and the Uchiha and Hyuga clans and strangely more intimidating and terrifying than anything else in the village she’d seen to date.

Jiraiya took a deep breath then, looked down at her, and said, “Just remember that you can always come and talk to me, okay?”

And then shortly after she was inside, sitting on a silver polished table that looked as if it was made to dissect things, engaged in a staring contest with the only other sannin that had managed to stay in the village. (Although that was an interesting thought, were they still the sannin if there were only two of them? How could you be the legendary three with only two? Did this now transform them into the dynamic duo or did they need to find a replacement third for the team?)

He was more on the side of weird with his appearance than Jiraiya was. Jiraiya, aside from the white hair and red triangles on his face, looked like a normal human being. This man’s face triangles were smaller (purple and less noticeable) and his hair was a familiar shade of dark brown that in the right light could be mistaken for black, yet somehow he had that inhuman ominous edge that Jiraiya lacked.

His unbelievably white skin (so white that his veins almost made it seem blue), his golden eyes with thin dark slivers for pupils, and even his thinness in comparison to the sheer weight and size that was Jiraiya made it very easy to see Orochimaru as something different to most ninja in the village. Something inherently dangerous.

This feeling could just stem from the fact that he’d been staring at her for ten minutes, with an intensity she’d only seen Minato have, and hadn’t said a word of explanation or introduction since the moment she’d come in and sat on his table but that was beside the point.

“Can I go home yet?” Lee finally asked, because if he was only going to stare at her then she really didn’t see a point in her being there, she could just hand him a photograph if he wanted to do that.

Not that she was explained the point of her being there, Jiariya had been strangely cryptic and vague, saying something about ninjutsu. Which, if that really was what she was doing here that was a terrible reason because Lee was awesome at ninjutsu.

“No.”

He didn’t offer any other explanation.

“Oh, well then. Likes, dislikes, hobbies, and dreams.” She paused, waiting for him to fill in, and explained in case he had somehow forgotten (although how you could forget Konoha’s standard introduction was beyond her), “Whenever you meet someone new you tell them your likes, dislikes, hobbies and dreams.”

“I don’t have the desire or the time to waste telling you my likes, dislikes, hobbies, and dreams.” He said, leaving Lee to nod dumbly wondering how he had time to stare if he didn’t have time for that, not that she minded since she didn’t really believe in the standard introduction anyway.

“Jiraiya said you can water walk.” The man said then, out of nowhere, and Lee nodded because she’d been impersonating Jesus since her early days in the orphanage. Without saying anything else the man went to the sink, filled a small metallic box of water, placed it on the floor and said, “Stand in this on top of the water.”

Lee hopped off the table and landed in the box, causing the water to ripple slightly, and then she stood there waiting for some further explanation. The man said nothing but instead turned away and exited the room, returning with a plain notebook and not even giving her a second look.

“So, is this it?” She asked when it became clear that this was it.

“We’re going to run through your chakra reserves, there are a variety of ways to do this, but this version doesn’t involve any effort on my part.”

Well, that was certainly honest of him. It was also clear that he really didn’t want to talk to her, or even acknowledge that she was in the room, and that would be fine with Lee if she wasn’t actually in the room standing on a box.

“So, I’m going to stand here for how long?” She asked, because he hadn’t really given her a clear answer.

“Until you no longer can.”

That could take a while, Lee had never really run out of chakra, in the sense that she couldn’t find the power to perform a jutsu. As far as she knew it just wasn’t possible for her, and that meant she’d be standing here all day if not longer.

“And that’s all I’m doing.” She said, just to get the point down, because if she was doing something else that’d be nice to know.

“You will also be silent.”

And she was, for about five minutes afterwards, and she used to be very good at that sort of thing but that was when she was with the Dursleys and they weren’t even worth talking to. If she stayed quiet too long it started reminding her of the cupboard beneath the stairs which was just depressing.

“What are you working on?”

He didn’t answer, so she tried again, “What are you working on?”

He still didn’t answer, she tried a third time, “What are you…”

“Kinjutsu; which is hardly any of your business.”

That was very non descriptive and Lee was still standing in a bucket of water. “What is the kinjutsu doing?”

The man sighed, rubbed a hand over his face, glared at her but appeared to give up and closed his notebook momentarily, “I am attempting to perfect the nidaime’s impure world reincarnation technique; and it is exceedingly difficult.”

“Oh, that sounds exciting, what does it…”

“It briefly restores the soul and chakra signature of someone from the pure world into a living body and allows you to then control that vessel.”

“Oh, a zombie army.”

Orochimaru didn’t deign to give that a response, judging by his expression he found that vaguely insulting, but Lee was still standing in a bucket of water so she felt she could say and ask for whatever explanations she liked. If he wanted her to be polite he should have invited Minato or else given her something more interesting to do.

“I’ve never tried to build a zombie army before.” Lee commented, this was true, it had never really crossed her and Minato’s list of things they should do. But it did sound useful, like one of those things you never knew you needed until you needed it, where on the battlefield surrounded by fallen comrades your final words would be, “By George, I wish I had a zombie army!”

It was very preemptive that Orochimaru was preparing his zombie army before this battlefield scenario took place. She almost said this but before she could a wonderful idea struck her, an awfully wonderful idea.

It was clear that Orochimaru wasn’t very interested in dealing with her, it was also clear that she wasn’t all that interested in dealing with him, unfortunately because of unknown outside influences they were more or less stuck together for the time being. However, Orochimaru was supposedly a very logical man, and if she presented him with enough of an incentive to let her go home and not stand in buckets of water he would probably take it.

And if there was one thing Lee had always been very good at it was creating jutsu on a whim.

“If I can get your technique working then can I go home?”

The man’s lips twitched into a humorless smile, one that only decorated the faces of the truly heinous James Bond villains, “Certainly, if you complete the Edo Tensei I will allow you to do anything your heart desires.”

Unspoken were the words, but you won’t, and it was there that Lee knew the trap was ready and set. It was that chunin look, one that apparently jonin had as well, the hubris that they had been around long enough to know what a genin was capable of.

She decided to push the envelope a little, “So then, if I complete your fancy zombie technique then I get to go home and not stand in a bucket anymore, and you have to buy me and Minato ramen forever.”

“I did say anything.”

And then she grinned, the grin full of jagged teeth and anticipation, the one that had always given the orphanage matron pause.

(Later, she would tell Minato that it had felt like dipping her hands into liquid light, closing her eyes and searching for something, waiting for something to come for her. Something that was at once instinctual and bizarre.

And in the dark, when she told him, his eyes would seem far too serious for his child’s body and it would seem that he understood the implications far more in that moment than she ever would.)

* * *

Jiraiya wasn’t sure what he expected when he returned to make sure Eru Lee was still alive and not decorating Orochimaru’s lab in bits and pieces.

It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Orochimaru, in a battle there was no one better to have your back than him and Tsunade, ruthless and vicious but he would see you get home alive and get the job done. But that was in battle, that was their friendship, that wasn’t dealing with Jiraiya’s genin students.

Because when Orochimaru had something he wanted, when he was told to research things like kekki genkai, when he was given a lab, then he sometimes didn’t know when to hold back. He didn’t know that cutting up Jiraiya’s genin couldn’t be justified even for the greater good of Konoha no matter what that sleazy creep Danzo might say.

Orochimaru tended to get tunnel vision in that lab of his and Jiraiya wouldn’t let Lee bear the brunt of that.

He wasn’t necessarily picturing that it had gone that far, not yet at least. Probably Oro had just drained her of too much blood, left her anemic and useless for sparring and missions, or maybe was poking her chakra with sticks but there was that pounding thought all morning of ‘what if, what if, what if’.

Even sensei hadn’t been one hundred percent reassuring about Orochimaru’s ability to deal with small children. And she was a child, even if she was a genin she was still too young and too inexperienced to deal with a situation that went south. Not to mention it was Lee and Lee’s ability to understand any situation, to know when too far was too far, was somewhat lacking.

What he hadn’t pictured, on walking into Orochimaru’s lab, was Lee standing in a bucket of water grinning proudly at what appeared to be the very confused and disoriented shodaime hokage Senju Hashirama and his brother the nidaime hokage Senju Tobirama while Orochimaru sat completely stunned with a ridiculously flabbergasted expression.

Flabbergasted, did that word even apply to Orochimaru? Could one use the words Orochimaru and flabbergasted in the same sentence? Apparently you could but even seeing it Jiraiya wasn’t quite believing it.

“…And now you have to buy me and Minato ramen forever.” Lee finished saying, as if this more than explained everything about the situation. With unexpected grace for a genin she then hopped out of the bucket and onto the floor, holding out her hand to each of the hokage, then grabbing theirs and shaking it in hers.

“Thank you, gentlemen, for your work and effort here today. A distinct pleasure to meet you both in person. Especially you, Hashirama, you’re my academy textbook’s favorite hokage.”

“Oh, well, you’re welcome…  I’m… glad we could help?” Hashirama said, and god he looked like he did in all of the pictures, only much more confused and disoriented.

Tobirama didn’t even respond, seemed too stunned for words to form, just kept staring at the girl with wide crimson eyes and looking just like he had before he’d died; like he’d never actually died in the first place.

“Kai.” Jiraiya said and looked over to Orochimaru as he realized they had both said it at the same time. Neither hokage disappeared.

They had chakra signatures, familiar chakra signatures, Jiraiya had never met Hashirama but he remembered when Tobirama had been hokage and the feel to the air was the exact same as it had been then. You couldn’t henge power like that and in spite of everything telling him it wasn’t possible he really felt that these were the two hokages.

Because if they weren’t the dead hokage then wouldn’t they be doing something… well, nefarious? All they had done so far was stand around and look really confused, sort of like Jiraiya was doing right now.

“I’m alive.” Tobirama finally managed to get out he then looked over to Hashirama with an even more baffled and almost horrified expression, “You’re alive.”

Hashirama walked forward in a daze, bumping into Orochimaru’s creepy silver polished table without even seeming to realize it, before he could walk past it and make it to the door Jiraiya stopped him. He’d never realized the first hokage had been such a small man, it could be because he was supposed to be dead and Jiraiya was kind of huge, but he looked so… lost.

“Hold it! Before we go walking anywhere let’s all take deep breaths and get this figured out.” Jiraiya said, because at this point he was feeling like he needed some deep breaths. Not as terrifying as the clone incident by any means, but still the weirdest thing that had ever happened to…

Abruptly Jiraiya realized that there was only one source for the exact explanation of what had happened, “Lee-chan, why are the first two hokage alive in Orochimaru’s lab?”

The girl was the only one who didn’t seem alarmed by any of this, she had that same expression on that she wore when they were sparring, performing D-ranks or doing anything, like there was no reason to be alarmed that all of the hokages that had ever existed were now alive and in the village. She rocked back and forth on her feet, a ridiculously casual gesture, and eyed Jiraiya speculatively as if she had no idea why he was so upset and was trying to figure out if she was supposed to know why he was so upset.

This was a game he and Lee played almost every morning and it wasn’t one he wanted to play right now.

“He said I could go home and stop standing in a bucket if I completed his zombie technique, he also promised to buy me and Minato ramen forever.” Lee then, in her typical extravagant hand gestures motioned to the two hokages, “I have successfully resurrected our two favorite deceased hokage and thus I can now stop standing in a bucket, go home, and get Orochimaru to pay for my ramen forever.”

The first thing to come out of his mouth probably wasn’t the first thing he should actually be asking, “Why would you promise her that?”

Then, blinking, he said the next thing that came into his head which also wasn’t even worth saying, “You two are clearly a terrible influence on each other!”

“Edo tensei,” The second hokage whispered his eyes widening in recognition and then he turned to the red headed girl with an alarmed expression, “You completed my technique.”

Then this expression morphed into something far more affronted, “You completed my technique for ramen?!”

“Well, no, I would have done it just to get out of the bucket but ramen forever is equal to the creation of any jutsu.” Lee said with an edge of authority, as if this was something she did on a daily basis and not the life’s work of one hokage and Orochimaru’s recent obsession.

“No, no, this isn’t edo tensei.” The nidaime was saying, looking down at himself as if to reassure himself that he was really there and not dead, “There’s no, there’s no other chakra signature, this body’s… empty. There wasn’t a sacrifice, what are you?”

And Lee had that adorably frustrating look of complete non-understanding on her face like she had no idea why anyone would ever ask her that after she’d just resurrected the dead, “I don’t understand the question.”

“Lee-chan,” Jiraiya said before the nidaime decided to eliminate the girl as a threat to Konoha or something else just as extreme, “He’s asking because you just raised the dead, as a genin, and you aren’t even breaking a sweat. It’s alarming.”

“Oh, I do alarming things all the time.”

“I know, Lee-chan, I am your sensei remember, I get to deal with your alarming pastimes on a daily basis. But just because I know you do alarming things doesn’t mean that they have any idea you do alarming things.” Jiraiya said motioning to the three other men in the room, because hell Orochimaru was getting included in this, if he had thought it was a good idea to goad Lee into using powerful untested jutsu then he clearly had no idea what he had gotten himself into.

“Oh… You know considering this whole chakra thing in general I really don’t understand the difference. They alter reality to their whims, I alter reality to my whims, Tora the evil demon cat lives forever and plagues Konoha for all eternity, if you think about it that way zombies aren’t that alarming. Besides, he was doing the whole zombie thing before I even got here.” Lee ended pointing an accusing finger at Orochimaru as if he should have some answer of why her raising the dead was different from him raising the dead.

Which, that was complicated, because looking at it simply then yes she was right. But raising the dead wasn’t the same as raising the dead and he just knew that he couldn’t explain that difference to Lee in a way she’d actually be satisfied with. So he settled for his usual short response, “It’s different, squirt.”

The girl sighed, appearing to give up, and said, “Well, either way I’m going home.”

And with that the girl began to saunter out the door leaving him, Orochimaru, and the first two hokage behind so that she could go find Minato and do whatever it was they did when Jiraiya left them alone too long. Jiraiya picked her up by the neck of her clothes and threw her over his shoulder like a back of rice before she could even think about it, “Nope! You’re going to the hokage! We’re all going to see the hokage!”

And Jiraiya was going to convince the old man, no matter what argument he had to make or what he had to promise, that Orochimaru and Lee could never be left alone in the same room ever again. 

* * *

Minato and Haru, after having been more or less abandoned by Jiraiya, were seated at the local ramen joint in a booth moping over their now empty bowls.

Minato could guess why Haru was unhappy. Recently Jiraiya had gotten a little more involved in training and the differences between the three of them had become all the more clear. Minato liked Haru, he was quiet, but he was hardworking and willing to more or less put up with the daily catastrophe that was Lee. He just never seemed to get anything right away, and something that Lee had been able to do since she was five, and Minato could grasp in ten minutes, would take him multiple days.

Jiraiya had also recently given him medic-nin texts which, well it wasn’t an insult, being a medic-nin was difficult and far from easy, it also was something usually reserved for the kunoichi of the team who had less chakra but more control. With their team it felt like Haru was being pushed in the medical direction if only because Minato and Lee weren’t stepping near it.

Minato was unhappy for different reasons.

Lee had been kidnapped or, almost kidnapped, and she had been fine (more than fine even without his help if he was honest) but it was still unnerving. He remembered running to her, his lungs on fire, and the only thought on his mind being the sight of her red hair and whenever he closed his eyes that sight still haunted him.

Running after that distant red hair.

He hadn’t realized that Konoha was vulnerable before and that the gate and walls could not keep everything out.

And that morning Jiraiya had carted her off to meet with Orochimaru about her ninjutsu and Minato could only sit there and wonder why Jiraiya had seemed so desperate to check up on them when he just left her there.

Not even bothering to take Minato with him as if there wasn’t anything Minato could do about it.

But he and Lee worked, Minato might be a little behind on the jutsus but that had never mattered before. They were a team, the best team, and he didn’t like the idea of her going off with people like Orochimaru without him having a real idea why. Treating them like, well, like they were two separate people and not _MinatoandLee_.

“I’m a terrible genin.” Haru finally said, distracting Minato from his own thoughts, “I was so happy when I graduated from the academy. I almost didn’t think I’d ever do it, and then I was placed with you and Lee, and I thought that maybe just maybe I could catch up.”

Haru paused when he saw Minato’s raised eyebrows and quickly rephrased this, “I mean, you two are kind of intimidating and terrifying, and Lee’s still pretty terrifying with the… clones… But I thought, you know if I’m placed on this team, then maybe I’m supposed to be here. But she’s off mastering ninjutsu with Orochimaru, Jiraiya barely has to spend any time teaching you anything to understand it, and I’m still working on the academy techniques. I’m the worst genin ever and you guys are going to pass the chunin exams and I’m just going to be a career genin.”

On another day, a day where Lee was sitting next to him, he’d feel the need to reassure him because Lee would no doubt be saying something in agreement that yes Haru was going to be a genin forever because he was useless and Minato would have to balance that. But without her he was out of balance, because it was true that Haru had to work much harder than him and Lee, and he and Lee probably would do better in the chunin exams than him.

So instead Minato decided to talk a little about his own problems, “You know, it never really bothered me how much better Lee is at jutsus than I am. I mean, it sort of bothered me, but I’m better at taijutsu and at understanding people. It was like, different strengths, so together we could accomplish anything. And we still can, we still are this super awesome team, but I haven’t caught up with her yet. There’s genius and then there’s _genius_ and there’s so much of a difference between the two that I just feel like she’s getting further and further away. What if she realizes she doesn’t need me anymore?”

Haru stared at him, blinking, and then asked, “What if you guys realize you don’t need me anymore?”

Minato felt his mood further plummet, because none of this had been reassuring, “I think we need more ramen.”

Before he could go to the counter and order another round though he heard a very familiar voice, “…And this is the ramen shop where Minato and I eat every day, which Orochimaru now gets to pay for, forever.”

And then there was Lee stepping in with Jiraiya, Orochimaru, and (here Minato quickly looked out the window to the hokage monument as if to reassure himself) the first and second hokage. Lee quickly caught sight of Minato and rushed over to him, and nowhere on her face was the doubt and uncertainty that Minato was feeling, she grinned like everything was fine and nothing had changed, “Minato, I have fantastic news, you and I never have to pay for ramen again.”

Lee then turned to Orochimaru, “That’ll be two miso ramens and…”

She looked meaningfully at the first and second hokage, they stared back for far too long seeming completely bewildered, then finally the first hokage said, “I... suppose I will have miso as well.”

The second hokage didn’t answer, just stood their looking both confused yet somehow furious as well, eventually causing the first hokage to just answer for him, “And Tobi will also have miso.”

Lee looked quickly back to Orochimaru her eyes insistent, “Four miso ramens.”

Orochimaru didn’t even have time to give an assent or dissent before the chef was started on the bowls, having seen enough of Minato and Lee to know that they generally got what they wanted, particularly when it came to ramen.

Lee then ushered everyone back to the table where Haru was still sitting, “Everyone, this is Minato who is awesome and Dead Last who is not. Minato and Dead Last, this is everyone, including the recently resurrected first and second hokage.”

The first and second hokage didn’t appear to know how to take this introduction, neither for that matter did Jiariya or Orochimaru.

“Lee, why did you resurrect the hokage?” Because that had to be the only reason this was happening. Minato had been around long enough to know that when things like this happened it was always because Lee had decided it should happen.

“Orochimaru promised you and me ramen forever if I could bring them back to life.” Lee explained and Minato nodded because this did seem like the sort of thing that Lee would get up to if he wasn’t around.

Although, bringing dead hokages back to life wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, it was just a little too soon after the recent D-rank clone disaster to start making these sort of waves again. Minato had been hoping to give Jiraiya a bit of time to adjust before the next incident happened.

But still, a part of him was relieved, because in a way this meant that they still needed to be a team. Even though Minato had been left behind and Lee had been off doing other things she’d come back and clearly was in a situation where his expertise was needed.

Still, this seemed a bit extreme even for Lee’s power level. Minato and Lee had never attempted something of this magnitude before the thought had never occurred to them to do so, “How’d you manage to do that?”

“Oh well, first I made the bodies, just made two empty clones and transformed them into these guys. Then, I don’t know, I just sort of thought about it for a bit, and it seemed like I always knew how to find people’s souls and here they are. It actually wasn’t nearly as hard as I thought it would be.” Lee explained with a shrug and Minato’s eyes flickered over to their guests and noted that they all looked more or less alarmed and extremely irritated by that, especially the nidaime.

“Anyway, we just came from meeting the current hokage and he said that we should give them a tour of Konoha, since they’ve both been dead for a while and things have changed since then. I think he also kind of wanted us out of his office, but he tried to be subtle which was nice.” Lee said in that way she always did when she was wrapping up a story with a neat little metaphorical bow.

And that was when Minato realized that it didn’t really matter, to Lee getting kidnapped meant nothing, nothing had changed. She was still the best recent graduate, he was still second best to her, and they still had weekly adventures which no one seemed capable of understanding. They were still, and would probably always be, _MinatoandLee_.

So Minato decided to let it go, to be a bit more like Lee and to focus on only what was practical and not what was troubling, and latched on to the other part of her story, “So, we don’t have to pay for ramen anymore?”

“That’s what you’re concerned about?” Jiraiya asked and then put his head into his hands, “Haru-kun, no matter what Lee-chan says about you, remember that you make up all of the normality of the team and without you it would be sheer and utter madness.”

Haru flushed, looking pleased, while Minato just felt vaguely insulted because while it took a certain kind of person to appreciate their super team he would have expected Jiraiya to at least understand why they did what they did.  

“Well, they’re clearly alive, they’re the hokage so we know they’re not going to destroy the village, and it already happened so…” So Minato might as well move on, you couldn’t get hung up on details with Lee, if you did then you’d never be able to get over it and would probably be driven completely insane.  

“Dead people are eating ramen with us!” Jiraiya exclaimed before looking over to the hokage, “No offense, hokage-samas.”

“No, no, it’s fine… I would be alarmed too.” The first hokage said, and it was so weird to see him in person and not in a book or on a mountain face looking down at them all, “I was wondering though if it… wears off. It’s not that I don’t like being alive and seeing how Konoha has grown and changed, or seeing my brother again for that matter but…”

“Wears off?” Lee asked and right then Minato knew what had happened. It didn’t wear off, whatever Orochimaru had asked her to do he had been vague and hadn’t asked her to make it temporary. You had to be very clear when you asked Lee to perform a jutsu because what you assumed was intuitive might not be intuitive at all.

“It does wear off, you used ninjutsu you said, you’ll run out of chakra and won’t be able to support it.” The second hokage said, at first with confidence then with trepidation as Lee’s wide eyed expression didn’t change.

“Lee’s never actually run out of chakra before.” Minato finally explained, “She’s sort of, well, a perpetual chakra machine so we’re not even sure she can run out of chakra.”

Minato, in attempting to copy her, had definitely reached his limit more than once but no matter what Lee did or how long she did it she never seemed to feel even the slightest bit of chakra exhaustion.

“Well, I think we all learned a very important lesson today about teamwork.” Lee said, “If we work together, and tell people what we want, and don’t have them stand in buckets all day the world is better for everyone.”


	4. Oro and Pals and Other Consequences

_In which the former hokages try to readjust to retirement and life in general, Orochimaru gains several new assistants and feeds the good majority of them to his giant snake friend Manda, and Jiraiya finally takes the tadpoles on a C-ranked mission that goes horribly wrong._

* * *

Grief is a thing you must bury. It didn’t fade in time, it didn’t lessen, it simply was overtaken by those other things you knew you must do and set aside for when you had a spare moment. If you didn’t bury it, then it would destroy you. It was a dulling, wrenching poison that boiled you alive from the inside. That was the mistake of too many Uchiha, it was not that they loved too deeply, but that they could never bear to put it aside when the time came to move on.

You watch them die, you bury their bodies, you turn your body into a sacrifice for their dream, you watch, you wait, you train an apprentice, and you try not to think about it too deeply.

Uzumaki Mito buried Hashirama long ago and in more recent years his face in her dreams had been replaced or merged rather with the fall of Uzushio and all of the Uzumaki with it. Hashirama would always be there, prominent, but in a way he was one of many that she must make time to scream for.

(Hashirama, this was not the dream you had, this was not the world you thought you could make possible, how have we come so far and yet failed so deeply?)

But Uzumaki Mito had spent the majority of her life not thinking of the dead and focusing on what was to come. Perhaps there were some survivors, scattered now by the fall of the village, but then again perhaps not. For Uzumaki Mito, who felt herself fading with each passing year, there was only one Uzumaki left whose existence she could prove.

Uzumaki Kushina, who was now in training to be her replacement, the next jinchuuriki of the Kyuubi no Kitsune.

Kushina was a little spitfire, claiming she was going to become the next hokage (and that’s good, hokage and not uzukage, she was looking ahead and not back to the village that wasn’t there anymore), and she would need that. She was going to need all of that confidence and fire with that thrice damned fox in her stomach.

A good apprentice, talented in seals, willing to face adversity, and one who had already known grief beyond imagining but had not broken or buckled.

Uzumaki Kushina was all that Mito ever expected to spend her energy on in the last years of her life.

But of course, in a strange way, it was just like Hashirama to return from the dead to her doorstep with flowers in his hand and that ridiculously stupid looking sheepish smile on his face.

And after yelling “kai” too many times to count, taking after Kushina and punching him in the face for daring to leave her alone so long, and then ushering him inside and sitting him down on the couch while yelling at Kushina to hurry up and bring the most expensive sake they had because goddammit she was celebrating, she just sat and stared across at him and thought about how he hadn’t aged a day. 

“So, it’s been a while then.” He said, and it struck her so much then how nostalgia didn’t suit him, he had never been one for regrets or sorrow or missed chances, not even with Madara.

“A very long time.” Mito agreed, feeling all of those years pressing down on her in wrinkles and blemishes and things she’d been thankful Hashirama never was with her to see.

“I would have come yesterday, Mito, I just… I couldn’t find where you lived, and I got lost since everything’s changed so much and… And well I had to meet with the new hokage, I like him, he has a good sense of humor. That’s important in a hokage you know, Tobi never quite got the hang of it.” Hashirama finished smiling weakly, pausing slightly over the words new hokage as if he couldn’t quite wrap his head around them.

“Well, you did find the place, eventually.”

He nodded, looking just as adorable and empty headed as he used to, “I had to ask for directions a few times.”

Out of the corner of her eye Mito saw a strangely skittish Kushina hesitating in the doorway with the bottle of sake, looking from Mito to the hokage with wide eyes, probably thinking the very same thoughts Mito herself was.

Mito almost motioned her in, but there was one question she had to ask first, must ask before anything else, “How long?”

He just gave her a sad sort of smile and shook his head, “I, I don’t know but… But they think it might be… They think it might be permanent.”

Might be permanent, as in he was truly back, whatever technique had brought him here was still lasting after a day and didn’t seem to be diminishing. And that was why he hadn’t found her first, she knew, he had been waiting to see if it was worth bringing the pain of losing him again into her life. If it was only a day, if it was only a moment, would it have been worth it to see him again?

Mito didn’t know, she didn’t know what she would have decided in that case, but for now she was just breathing a sigh of relief because ‘it might be permanent’ meant that the end would not be soon.

“Kushina,” Mito said turning to her wayward apprentice and motioning for her to come in, “I’d like you to meet my husband, Senju Hashirama.”

And in that moment of introduction Mito realized she had a problem that she never imagined she would have had, Hashirama looked several decades younger than her, and somehow inadvertently Mito felt like she was robbing cradles.

* * *

“What do you mean she left the village?”

Hiruzen had been dreading this moment, of course he had been dreading it in his afterlife, when he would have to reckon with his failures to those who had passed before him. It was there, in the pure world, that he expected he would have to explain his failures with Tsunade.

He had not expected that those who had safely been residing in the pure world would come to him.

But then he was dealing with a lot of problems he did not expect to have, and although he could hardly complain of the return of two kage level shinobi, he couldn’t help but wish that Orochimaru had a little more common sense.

Every spy in Konoha was twitching and it was a race against time for Jiraiya to provide them with an explanation that they would accept. Luckily Eru Lee was infamous in only certain small circles and only for some of her more ostentatious abilities. She was known to those in her academy class (but without experience half of them wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between Eru’s jutsus and that of a competent jonin), known to ANBU who often cleaned up her messes, Jiraiya, and Orochimaru, but beyond that there was a fortunate lack of curiosity about the skills of clanless orphan genin.

The official rumor spread now, under Jiraiya’s discretion via ANBU, was that Orochimaru had been responsible after modifying and completing the nidaime’s edo tensei. Orochimaru, while he did not appreciate the idea that he was being given credit for something a twelve year old girl had stolen from him for ramen, could take the heat and the undoubted assassination attempts that would come from this sort of action.

But this meant that another war was made even more unlikely. There were now three kage level shinobi within Konoha not to mention Orochimaru and Jiraiya; it would be suicide for another village to declare war right now and Hiruzen could imagine that they would all be very cautious for years to come.

Without realizing it Eru Lee and Orochimaru had bought them at least five years of peace… for ramen.

There was something so telling about that but Hiruzen wasn’t quite sure what it was only that it made him feel very old and tired. But that at least caused a smile to stretch on his face, speaking of Tsunade, who he’d always thought of as a daughter, only brought up cruel memories.

“Life has not been kind to Tsunade, particularly since your death.” Hiruzen started but as expected this did not appease Tobirama in the slightest, “Nawaki died in the war, that nearly broke her but she pulled through it. Then she met a man named Dan, fell in love, but he too died in the war. She came to blame herself for both of their deaths and developed a crippling fear of blood, rendering her useless as a field medic. Without any family left in the village, without Dan, without her career, I could not convince her to stay.”

He did not add that since then Jiraiya’s sources had mostly documented her drinking and gambling and collecting a sizable fortune in debts while Dan’s niece Shizune tried to mitigate the damage.

“Convince her to stay? The Senju founded this village, it is because of the Senju, because of her grandfather, that this village even exists. Running away is nothing more than spitting on all of our graves.”

Hiruzen said nothing, not because it was true, but because he doubted Tobirama could be made to understand. Konoha did not mean the same thing to Tsunade as it did to him and his brother, she had not seen it built, seen the clan wars that came before it. To her it was a place that had been filled only with death and disappointment, and seeing the dead that surrounded her Hiruzen hadn’t been able to find a way to disagree.

“She may return now.” Hiruzen said, leaning forward on his desk and staring the resurrected hokage in the eye, “Now that you and Hashirama are alive she will want to see you and may return to the village for that.”

“She will return.” Tobirama said, “You will send a team to get her and you will drag her back kicking and screaming if you have to.”

Unfortunately there were few shinobi who could endure Tsunade’s kicking and screaming. But there was something else about his words that bothered Hiruzen, had been bothering him ever since the two men had returned to life.

If there were three hokages living at a time which of them got to wear the hat?

“I will do what I will do, the hat belongs to me now. I will send a team, but they won’t drag her back kicking and screaming, and you will abide by my decision as your hokage.” And he could see the bitterness and indecision there, family and clan versus the authority of Konoha, because he could not have both, not anymore.

Finally, after too long of a pause, Tobirama bowed his head, “Yes, hokage-sama.”

And Hiruzen got to wear his hat without challenge another day, “Good, I will place you on the team to find her. By that time word will no doubt have spread already of you and your brother’s miraculous resurrection and seeing you in person may be all she needs to convince her.”

He had almost forgotten how rare it was to see a man like Tobirama grateful.

* * *

“I’m Eru Lee and I like supporting Orochimaru through emotionally difficult times in his life!”

At the sight of a little girl beaming across at Orochimaru, completely oblivious to his companions and the sake between them, Hatake Sakumo and Jiraiya burst into helpless laughter. Needless to say, this was not Orochimaru’s idea, but then the fact that it was Jiraiya’s idea (Jiraiya not only volunteering but actively dragging Orochimaru into public with one of his other friends) spoke volumes of how much had changed.

And it all boiled down to Orochimaru’s infuriating new pet project, Jiraiya’s new genin, and ANBU’s apparent chronic menace Eru Lee.

“Ignore it, in five hours it will get frustrated and either attempt to kill me or itself.” Orochimaru said, but this only made the laughter worse, the only thing stopping the other patrons from staring being the fact that this was a shinobi bar and they had all seen far odder.

If they had been in the civilian side of the restaurant district god only knew what they would be thinking.

“God, that’s… well it’s frankly quite horrible but it’s still so…” Hatake was saying between chuckles, managing to get a hold of himself better than Jiraiya, “I swear those kids get into so much trouble.”

“Let me guess, you knew what Lee-chan’s brand of madness was capable of the entire time, and you didn’t even bother to warn me. Sakumo, you dirty bastard.” Jiraiya said fondly before taking a swig of sake, “Of course, that’s why I’m here now, making up for lost time and all.”  

Frankly, that was the reason Orochimaru had agreed as well. Before the girl had been brought to Orochimaru’s attention she had mostly been kept track of by two parties, ANBU and the Uchiha police force. The Uchiha liked to play close to the chest, even with chronic pests, and ANBU normally even more so but Jiraiya had a bit of an in with the White Fang.

That and, when you started asking about Eru Lee on the streets, it was apparently common knowledge that Hatake Sakumo was a longtime acquaintance of the girl’s even beyond his involvement in ANBU.

“Well, better late than never, I was meaning to check in with you anyway and see how it was all going.” He sighed then, no doubt thinking that with the latest developments in Konoha he hadn’t managed to find the time.

Orochimaru had little doubt ANBU was scrambling to find guards to cover their recently resurrected hokage and to spread the rumor that Orochimaru himself was responsible for this whole mess.

Which left him scrambling to complete the edo tensei since he refused to be held responsible for something he hadn’t managed himself. He had no doubt that he could do it, that one day he could complete it, but he wondered (and wasn’t that infuriating) if he would ever replicate Eru Lee’s own performance.

Edo tensei without sacrifice, without a significant decrease in chakra, without any DNA from the resurrected subjects, simply out of nowhere as if it was no more complicated than an academy jutsu.

If he wasn’t so interested in discovering just what this kekki genkai of hers was he would be seething (as it was he was doing a bit of both).

“So, Oro, what’s the deal with your Lee-chan clone there?” Jiraiya said motioning to the clone of Eru Lee which was focused intently on Orochimaru.

Emotional Support Lee was among a number of clones that Lee had developed for Orochimaru. There was also the infinitely more useful and tolerable Lab Assistant Lee, the expendable and mass produced Test Subject Lees, the even more expendable and useless Manda Food Lees, and more whose purpose Orochimaru didn’t have the patience to figure out.

Aside from Emotional Support Lee (who would very soon find herself becoming a Manda Food Lee if she didn’t become discouraged and kill herself first) the whole thing worked more or less if in a bizarre and unprecedented fashion.

This had come after Orochimaru had been offered a partnership with Danzo.

The man was a spider, skulking about in the dark out of Sarutobi sensei’s sight, spinning webs and trapping flies. Orochimaru was under no misunderstanding that to a man like Danzo Orochimaru was simply another, if somewhat more talented, fly. And the way the man had approached him, offering him opportunities the hokage denied him, giving him a way to achieve his goals and go beyond that which Jiraiya was doing, well it made it clear that Danzo thought that Orochimaru barely needed a nudge in root’s direction.

However, Orochimaru had been more hesitant than Danzo would have expected.

True, until recently he would have been far more tempted by that offer, if only because things in the village had not been going well for him. The sannin had turned out to be pathetically brief lived, given their name. Tsunade had abandoned the village and was most likely never to return, Jiraiya had only just returned from his Ame orphans and had seemed all too willing to push Orochimaru aside, and Sarutobi-sensei… Orochimaru had always respected his sensei, the hokage, but he had wondered if the man respected or even trusted him.

Jiraiya, after failing to return from the front with Tsunade and Orochimaru, was given a genin team while Orochimaru who had never left the village or shown any disloyalty had not. And true, he didn’t like children, he knew he didn’t like children, but all the same he had wondered and felt a slight that his own sensei just liked Jiraiya better.

But that wasn’t quite true, because in a way Sarutobi sensei had given him genin, he’d given him access to Jiraiya’s own kunoichi and since then everything had changed. The hokage had returned from the dead and edo tensei had been completed by a twelve-year-old girl. More than that under the pretext of making sure Orochimaru didn’t damage his students Jiraiya was seeking Orochimaru out once again, Sarutobi sensei was trusting him not only with something that was vital and involved children but also something Orochimaru was actually interested in (and he would fully admit now that he was not interested in taking on a genin team), and perhaps with the return of her grandfather and uncle Tsunade would find her reason to return to Konoha.

So when Danzo had made Orochimaru his offer Orochimaru had not been entirely certain he wanted to take it.

On the one hand he had no doubt that Danzo could get him any materials and test subjects he could desire if only because he believed it would benefit Konoha as a whole. And he did want that, more than anything he wanted, no needed the freedom to experiment in methods that Sarutobi sensei would not necessarily approve of. If he was to develop a means of conquering death, of combining all the greatest of bloodlines, then he needed this.

However, on the other hand this was a step that could not be brushed off, he could not simply dally with Danzo, with illegal experimentation and expect it to be passed over if he was found out. Perhaps he could keep it secret, but one must always plan for the worst. In that case he would have to leave everything, Konoha itself, behind and possibly become a missing nin.

So he had been in his lab, which was state of the art and which did have many of the materials he needed, and he had been consumed with his decision of how far he was willing to push his loyalties.

He also had the distinct pleasure of having to deal with Eru Lee at the same time, “Alright, let’s see this… grabbing jutsu again.”

The girl just stared at him, flatly, the sort of look he often gave to Jiraiya but did not appreciate having pointed at himself, “Look, it always works. It doesn’t matter where I’m standing, if I’m looking at it, what it’s made of, how far away it is, if it’s in another room, I can always get it.”

She was probably right, but Orochimaru didn’t believe in short cuts, and more this at least kept her busy and gave him time to think, “Never the less.”

The girl sighed, ever dramatic, and ran a hand through bangs pushing the red hair away from her face and looked as if she was long past the edge of her patience, “Never the less even one of my clones could do this. You and I both have better things to do than stand here and watch me grab things with my magical ninjutsu powers.”

He had been about to respond that this was how you found limits to any kekki genkai not to mention it would give him an idea of what to call a blood limit which at first glance appeared to have no limits at all when the idea had first occurred to him.

“Say that again.” He said, slowly, ignoring the way the girl looked at him dubiously.

“You and I both have…” She started, in the exact same tone as before if with a very irate expression.

He cut her off before she could waste his time, “No, before that, about the clones.”

“Even one of my clones could do this?” She asked, looking uncertain, and then added, “Well, it’s true. My clones can do this, they can’t do everything I can do but they can do the grabbing jutsu no problem.”

He had seen those clones, inspected them himself, and the one thing that had struck him most about them was that they were indistinguishable from a human body. They had heartbeats, blood, organs, chakra coils, everything and anything you needed to be human. For all intents and purposes, for all his purposes, they might as well be human.

“Can you ever modify them?” He asked spinning to her, but he knew she could, she’d said as much about the resurrected hokage. She had said that the bodies were clones that she had transformed into the forms of Senju Hashirama and Senju Tobirama.

And from what she and the Namikaze boy had observed, and what he had seen in the continued existence of the resurrected hokage, her chakra reserves were almost larger than conceivable meaning that she should be able to support dozens, possibly hundreds, of clones in any given moment.

Thus, instead of entering into a partnership with Danzo, Orochimaru had entered into a much more legal if somewhat bizarre and violent partnership with Eru Lee. She would provide him test subjects to his specifications as well as anything else he should require and in turn he would follow through on his promise to pay for her ramen and stop wasting their time with his petty tests as she called it.

However, he doubted Jiraiya would appreciate the cleanliness of such an agreement, so as he sipped from his own cup he only gave a small self-satisfied smile as if he knew some grand secret Jiraiya could never hope to understand.

“Oro, please, that face, it makes me thing you’re having naughty thoughts.” Jiriaya said shaking his head as if to expel bad images.

Orochimaru’s smile immediately disappeared at the thought of what Jiraiya’s hopelessly perverted imagination could come up with in regards to him and Eru Lee.

“Is she working on ninjutsu with you?” Hatake asked before musing, “I hope you know that I’ve called dibs on her for an apprentice.”

Jiraiya and he must have both had the same dumbfounded expression at the idea of anyone wanting that walking basket of hell to be their apprentice.

“Do you have any idea what that girl is capable of if given even the slightest amount of direction or instruction?” The man asked, rhetorically as it was since Orochimaru and Jiraiya didn’t have an answer to that, since they had only seen the latest incidents, it was hard to imagine anything grander than the return of two hokage.

Of what she would be capable of with instruction and direction.

“Which reminds me, back to this Lee-clone you have, what the hell?” Jiraiya said motioning to the little girl sitting next to them, her hitaei bright and shining, and that obnoxious overtly cheerful smile decorating her lips.

“I’m Eru Lee and I like supporting Orochimaru through emotionally difficult times in his life!” The clone repeated before adding in the same thoughtlessly cheerful tone, “My purpose is to help Orochimaru learn to live outside of his terrifying science laboratory and make friends with real people in the village. So far he is doing adequately, should this night go well perhaps even superbly, then soon my task may be fulfilled and I can return to delightful non-existence.”

They all stared at her for a few moments, Jiraiya with raised eyebrows and a growing look of concern on his face, and Hatake with a touch of incredulity. Finally, Hatake spoke, “A word of advice, regarding Lee-chan. I don’t know what you’re doing with her, or what you’ve been asked to do, but if you bring in Minato-kun you will find your work finished much easier.”

“So, they really are that codependent.” Jiraiya muttered into his glass of sake his look of concern turning into one that was pensive, reflecting on the nature of his genin team.

“Not codependent, more like an ouroboros, the dragon which devours its own tail. They act as a single shinobi, Namikaze Minato as the face and Eru Lee as the power, and over the seven years they’ve known each other this has changed and grown but essentially remained the same. To deal with one without the other is to deal with one half of a superb shinobi; with Eru Lee the raw power and unrefined ability, with Namikaze Minato the direction and understanding without a jonin’s or even chunin’s ability to see it through. The best results will happen when you deal with both.”

“Damn, that was pretty deep there, Sakumo.” Jiraiya said, blinking, “How long did it take you to come up with that?”

“Oh, well, to be honest I asked Minato-kun what he thought about it. It’s hard to look past the overpowered flashiness that’s Eru Lee and see the team dynamic behind it; but it’s there.” Hatake said with a laugh, waving off Jiraiya’s comment as if it was inconsequential, but Orochimaru pondered it further.

He hadn’t given the boy much thought, hadn’t given him a moment’s thought if he was honest, the boy was smart that was clear, but he was also only a genin and compared to his teammate completely unremarkable. In five years he might be something worth keeping an eye now but for the moment Orochimaru had his hands full with only one of Jiraiya’s brats.

“It’s just too bad that it takes three to make a team. Haru-kun will manage to squeeze his way in there somehow, I’m sure. But it probably would be a good idea for Minato to check in with you every once in a while, Oro.”

“I don’t need watching from a twelve year old boy, moron.” Orochimaru practically spat out earning a rather intense glare from Emotional Support Lee.

“You’ll never make friends if you insult their intelligence on a regular basis. You have to pretend to like them and respect their intellect and bury those kinds of thoughts deep down in the bottom of your brain where you’ll never think about them again.” The Eru Lee clone advised, making them all wonder just how often the original Eru Lee had followed that advice and whether it actually worked for her or not.

“I also don’t need advice from you.” Orochimaru responded in the tone that would have any enemy nin fleeing from his sight and the death that was sure to follow. Unfortunately, Lee clones were chronically suicidal.

“Orochimaru-sama, you live in your science lab and spend your time feeding clones to your terrifyingly large pet snakes. My entire existence revolves around the fact that you have no friends. In other words your complete and utter incompetence in the realm of social engagements is so vast that it created life. That in itself only proves that you are very much in need of advice.”

For a moment the only sounds were that of the conversations surrounding them, the clinking of glasses, and the distant sound of music wafting through the air.

Finally Jiraiya spoke, “That’s it, next time she goes over to you Minato’s going too.”

And from his expression Orochimaru could just tell that there was nothing he could possibly say to the man to change his mind. So all that was left to do was rub his temples and wonder if it was too undignified to pound his head against the table and wish he had just stayed home after all.

* * *

“Why hello there, beautiful.”

It was a great day in fake Konoha.

The sun was shining, the grass was green, the ramen was both salty and delicious, and team seven was being assigned their first C-rank after too many D-ranks to count and too many delays to bother mentioning.

Lee was very pleased.

This was in spite of the fact that C-ranks were only a hop skip and a jump away from being a D-ranks. Meaning that they rarely involved excitement, urgency, or violence and instead were centered around protecting wealthy clients from bandits and escorting people here and there or delivering non-important messages and packages.

Jiraiya had been very clear, before they’d been assigned it, that C-ranks would not involve anything Lee would call exciting and if he saw any sign of what Lee would call exciting then they were hauling ass back to Konoha and doing D-ranks forever.

However, Jiraiya seemed more than a little distracted at the sight of their client, and Lee didn’t think he’d be able to hold himself to his promise.

The job was to escort the daughter of a merchant back to her home village after having visited Konoha. And Jiraiya was strangely just as excited about that as Minato was. Haru was vaguely nauseous looking at the idea of moving ahead in his shinobi career, while Lee was anticipatory but hardly overtly excited about all of this.

“What’s your name? No, let me guess, it must be something as beautiful as you are. Yuriko, because you are blooming like a lily in springtime? No, what about Akira-chan, like light drifting from the heavens?” Jiraiya stepped almost uncomfortably close to the young woman, causing her face to flush and her eyes to look downward, and he offered her a large and probably what he was considering charming smile.

“Jiraiya, you couldn’t wait until you reached the main gates?” The hokage asked, but in that way that meant he probably didn’t expect their sensei to answer and was directing his question instead at God himself.

"But, Sarutobi-sensei, I am waiting until I get to the main gates.” Jiraiya said which only caused the hokage to let out a long suffering sigh and rub at his temples. The man then sent what could only be described as a pitying expression towards the three genin.

“See that he doesn’t stop at too many hot springs on the way.” The hokage said in dismissal, not bothering to explain what that could possibly mean and what was wrong with Jiraiya that would warrant such cryptic warnings.

In a movie or a television show this would be the part where there would be ominous music, a closing door, and the feeling that you had heard part of a terrible secret that would only make sense when it was far too late.

But, on the other hand, that probably meant that hot springs contained some hidden danger and thus violent excitement. And if that was the case then Lee was very much pro hot spring even if the hokage was not. 

Shortly after that they were on the road, walking out of Konoha's gate for the first time. It struck her then, as they walked along the dirt path, that this was the first time she had ever been outside of the village since she had arrived there when she was five years old. Konoha had never seemed small or confining, not in the way that Surrey had, there had always been some new street or angle or something left unexplored.

Even now, she couldn’t help but look back at the gates and think that there was so much she had left undone, so much she had yet to explore with only the hint of what it might be. Konoha, it was an entire country compressed into a single village, it felt odd to be leaving it only for a little while.

When she had left Surrey there had been no thought of turning around and heading back to that small dark cupboard.

“So, uh, Lee, where is the village _Surrey_ anyway? You’re from there, right? Is it on our way? All of my family lives in Konoha so I’ve never really left the village before.” And of course Dead Last was being useless and babbling to make up for his complete inadequacy.

“I have absolutely no idea but I doubt it’s on the way.” Considering the times she and Minato had poured over different maps and failed to find any hint of Great Britain it was safe to say that it wasn’t nearby.

“Really, but you came to Konoha, so if it’s that far how did you…”

“ _Teleported_ , Dead Last, _teleported_.” She said, because really, when you could cut through time and space and go anywhere you pleased it really made things like distance seem irrelevant.

“Te…Teru… What does that mean?” Dead Last must be nervous about being outside Konoha because he was rarely this persistent in conversation. Not with her anyway, if he was really antsy for a talking buddy he usually would settle for Minato. But unfortunately she and Minato had been walking in companionable silence before Dead Last had started and so it looked like Minato wasn’t about to provide a distraction.

Jiraiya, too, was too busy walking ahead of them with the lady client (a speculative gleam in his eye as he made more or less covert glances at her breasts and back end) and the fact that he hadn’t even glanced back to make sure his genin were staying out of trouble meant that he wasn’t about to distract Dead Last either.

“Fancier shunshin.” Seeing his confused and somewhat alarmed look she expanded upon her explanation, “Even with _teleportation_ , I figured since no one has heard of Shakespeare I must be ridiculously far from _England_.”

“Oh, isn’t that the man who wrote the play about the crazy prince who kills the daimyo?” Minato asked, it was Lee’s regret that she had yet to get Minato to appreciate the death and insanity that was Shakespeare.

“No, there are multiple plays about the crazy prince and or shinobi who kills the kage and or daimyo. _Julius Caeser_ , _Macbeth_ , _Hamlet_ …” Lee trailed off, not quite sure whether to include King Leer in the list or Othello, as someone had gone crazy and killed someone but not necessarily the subordinate with the king.

“How many times can someone kill a kage?” Minato asked with raised eyebrows.

“As many times as they need to.” Besides, she had no doubt that if Shakespeare was around there would be a play called Madara featuring betrayal, giant foxes, and monologues of epic proportion in the middle of shinobi battles.

Minato seemed dubious, she’d have to produce more clones whose sole purpose was to perform Shakespeare, only then could he appreciate Hamlet stabbing Polonious through a curtain.

“So… We’re probably not visiting your home village then.” Dead Last said, bringing them full circle back to his original pointless question.

“God, I hope not.” The last thing she needed was a reunion with the Dursleys and her cupboard. Of course, she could now beat the shit out of them if they even tried to stick her in a cupboard, which might actually be somewhat hilarious. Not to mention the fact that they weren’t really people, were probably someone’s malfunctioning genjutsu, and had most likely been overwritten by Konoha and probably didn’t even exist anymore.

So really, the likelihood of ending up in Surrey was quite minimal.

Although, in retrospect, perhaps ending up in Surrey would have been easier and less painful than what actually had happened on that fateful doomed C-rank that would forever cause Jiraiya, the great toad pervert sage, to hesitate on entering a bathhouse.

* * *

“So, tadpoles, you’re all half-way grown into frogs by this point and on your first C-ranked mission. You’re big kids, you can handle yourselves without burning down the hotel.”

They were in the hotel outside of their client’s booked room, each of them looking alert and prepared for battles. Although Minato couldn’t help but think that it was uneventful thus far and thus most likely to snowball into something he was in no way shape or form prepared for.

It went like this, when things were too easy for too long Lee had a tendency to get bored. When Lee got bored she often thought of solutions to what she saw was a dire problem and these solutions tended to spiral out of control and turn into jutsus whose implications were terrifying.

And if Lee didn’t get bored then something else did, because things never stayed easy and simple for very long, even when they tried their best to see that things remained as they were. All things, Lee had a tendency to say, move towards chaos.

As if to prove this point Lee responded to Jiraiya’s words first, “Sensei, I don’t think I can handle myself without burning down the hotel.”

“Are you serious?” He asked, understanding that Lee was always serious but still not quite getting it. Most people didn’t, the fact that Jiraiya had come this far spoke volumes about him, really.

“What if it’s filled with plant zombies?” Lee asked, “I may have no choice but to burn down the hotel.”

“Why would it be filled with plant zombies?”

“I don’t know, Orochimaru’s making zombies, the nidaime’s making zombies, what if the shodaime starts making zombies and it goes terribly terribly wrong and they turn into the evil photosynthesizing dead.” Lee said as if this argument was perfectly valid, which to her it was, and should she be the one making the plant zombies Minato would more than believe it was possible.

“The shodaime isn’t going to make zombies and even if he did make plant zombies he would never use them to invade this hotel. So you have absolutely no reason to set it on fire, ever.” Jiraiya said, looking down at her with severe intensity that would make any academy student burst into tears but only made Lee blink a little.

Jiraiya then pointed abruptly to Minato and Haru in turn, “Minato-kun, you keep her in line. Haru-kun, you keep things normal, and all of you keep an eye on the client.”

“Where are you going, sensei?” Haru asked, looking fearful as he caught on to the drift of this speech, that Jiraiya was about to leave them alone for a little while.

“Me? Why, Haru-kun, I am going to appreciate the nubile female form at this town’s public baths and hopefully invite an exquisite specimen to my hotel room tonight.”

This was about where Minato’s rational thought broke off and he began to realize that there were many things he didn’t know about his sensei that he really should have.

“What?” Minato asked, and he knew without even looking that Lee and Haru were mirroring his own expression.

“I’ve been so busy with you squirts that I haven’t had time to visit hot springs and public baths and I think I’m starting to get withdrawals.” Jiraiya shuddered, showing his withdrawl symptoms from… what sounded like spying on women in changing rooms.

“… Can’t you wait until we’re done with the mission?” Haru asked weakly his eyes wide and his face pale.

“Nope, sorry kids, you’ve got to start learning independence sometime and between Lee’s terrifying arsenal of jutsus, Minato’s shogi master strategy, and your… normalness you guys can handle anything that’s likely to walk into this hotel.” Here Jiraiya’s grin dropped suddenly and he was once more the sober war-hardened jonin, “Shinobi are not coddled, if you show promise you will be pushed through the ranks, this is what that means. It won’t be easy, but you’ve shown that you can handle it, and I believe you can handle it.”

They were silent for a few moments, the weight of Jiraiya’s praise falling on each of their shoulders, and for perhaps the first time Minato truly began to recognize what it meant to be a ninja. Because Jiraiya was right, any coddling they’d had, was nothing more than an illusion.

“What if you just sleep with the client instead? Two birds, one stone, you get to have sex and oogle breasts and the mission is completed at the same time.” Lee suggested, causing Minato’s train of thought to once again hurl itself off of the tracks.

Jiraiya just blinked looking stunned and then responded, “Because I don’t want to.”

And as usual, he offered no goodbye, only a sad pile of leaves from the remains of his body flicker. And as if to summarize their stunned disbelief at having been abandoned by their sensei for sex Lee said calmly with a certainty not to be questioned, “We’ll definitely have to burn down the hotel because of plant zombies.”

Minato had agreed, if only in sentiment, but he hadn’t been ready yet. The truth was that genin weren’t shinobi, they were shinobi in training, they were potential not yet realized.

Minato could one day become a great jonin, hokage even, that was what his headband meant as it shone like a sun on his brow. But that was the future, what could be, not what was. For now, he was only a boy who was faster than anyone else his age and stronger than most, who was clever, and who showed so much promise but only promise.

The field was not the academy. Knowing something was different than believing it and believing different than knowing.

That night he’d agreed that something was going to happen (because it always did) but he hadn’t acted on it, because he hadn’t believed it. But Lee, Lee always believed the things she said, even when no one else did.

And in some warped demented way she usually was right.

At some point he’d drifted to sleep, his watch having been long over, and he’d woken up to the silent rustling of leaves, the smell of blood, and Lee’s eyes over his burning too brightly in the dark.

In her hand was a single flame, white like starlight instead of red and never flickering as she held it, and she said, “Minato, we need to leave now.”

* * *

“It regenerates.”

Those were her first words after she had woken Haru and the client and teleported them all outside the bathhouse where they could watch the burning hotel from a safe distance. She didn’t say whether she’d gotten the others out only watched the burning with an expression he’d never seen on her face before.

She was clutching her ribs; Minato could still make out the iron scent of blood.

Haru was almost comical looking, clutching at his hair, his mouth hanging open but nothing coming out but there was nothing comical in Lee in that moment.

“I’ve never fought a jonin before, Minato.” She said suddenly, turning to look at him, “Not seriously, not when they’re taking me seriously. I didn’t realize they don’t waste time. Villains’ monologues are for Shakespeare and James Bond; they don’t waste time chatting.”

“Who was it?”

“What.” She corrected turning her head from the fire and looking him directly in the eye, “A what, not a who.”

“What was it?”

“I don’t know, it cut the power before it got to our floor, and then it laced the place with a genjutsu and then things got a little messy.” She grimaced, clutching at her ribs again, and Minato wanted to ask about them but he somehow found that he couldn’t.

“How do you know it’s not human then?” He asked and she shrugged giving him a wry sort of smile.

“Just a feeling, the regeneration thing was sort of a clue, but even that… It didn’t move like a person, didn’t act like one either, there were just too many pieces missing… I don’t know, but this will slow it down for a while.”

Then it struck Minato why she had said that, why she could assume this so easily, “It was waiting for Jiraiya to leave.”

It was waiting for its opportunity to get them on their own, to do something without Jiraiya’s intervention, and it had almost succeeded because Minato hadn’t woken for any of it and…

“What happened to the people in the hotel?” He asked, and Lee just shook her head with pursed lips, and turned back to look into those white flames burning like a fallen star that had managed to crash into the building.

“Holy shit, the hotel is actually on fire.” And there was their sensei, wrapping a towel around himself and staring open mouthed at the fire.

“Forgive me, sensei, I had no choice.” Lee said, and Jiraiya whacked her on the back of the head before whacking Minato on the back of his.

“No choice? I thought we talked about how there was plenty of choices…” He trailed off, catching sight of Lee’s stained hand, and fell immediately silent.

(Later they would deliver their shaken client to her destination, bidding her goodbye and apologizing for the violence along the way, but she smiled and said she was impressed by how three small children had managed to protect her so well from kidnapping and assassination.

None of them corrected her, they simply smiled, and then turned running on the lonely winding path that lead back to Konoha.)


	5. Linus and Lucy

_In which Jiraiya’s team prepares for a second C-rank which will hopefully be less plant zombie assassin filled than the last one, Emotional Support Lee questions the meaning of her fruitless existence and Orochimaru’s stubbornness, and of all the Charlie Browns Haru is surely the Charlie Browniest._

* * *

“I feel as if this might be the end for us.”

Hidden in the trees, desperately panting and trying to ignore the scent of smoke behind them, Haru felt that gnawing pit in his stomach deepen at Minato’s words. Because he’d given up more or less a while ago, but Minato had pulled them through, and if Minato was now saying they were at the end of their rope then…

“It’s been good knowing you, Haru-kun.” Minato said with a final weary smile.

Haru was about to say something, insist that this couldn’t be it, but then he felt it. That overwhelming presence, the chakra that blazed uncontrollably like a second sun, and there she was with that fox demon grin and sparkling green eyes.

“Found you.”

* * *

Since they had gotten back from their first C-rank things had changed, or at least, slightly.

Haru was still dead last, Minato and Lee still frolicked ahead of him leaving nothing but chaos in their wake, Lee still disappeared every once in a while to train with Orochimaru, and Haru still had yet to walk up a tree.

It was just, Lee seemed to be taking training a little more seriously than she used to.

It wasn’t that Lee didn’t take training seriously before, just that she’d always seemed sort of removed from it. Taking the easiest solution (which for her always amounted to ninjutsu) and leaving the rest of them to flounder. Activities that were supposed to take hours took ten minutes, spars were ended in seconds, and then she’d go on to do something else.

Taijutsu to Lee wasn’t efficient, wasn’t necessary, so she hadn’t bothered with it.

After the C-rank, which had left her with a shallow wound in her ribcage that could have been lethal with only a little more force, she seemed to have changed her mind.

(“It’s not enough,” She said to the hokage when they’d returned from their mission, “To be merely gifted with ninjutsu, not nearly enough.”)

He had always been slightly terrified of Lee, even when they were only six years old and he had looked at her and Minato and thought they were just like him, clanless and without any prior training (of course that impression hadn’t lasted long at all).

He sometimes thought she wasn’t human at all but was instead something just wearing a human face, a kitsune perhaps, since she sometimes seemed to grin like a trickster spirit. She smiled too brightly and too often without feeling in it, basic aspects of human nature confounded her, and she lived ate and breathed jutsu in a way that just wasn’t possible for someone like him. And she always had looked through him, past him, beyond him and he had the feeling that if he felt the weight of her true regard her true focus he might burn under its intensity.

(He’d seen how she sometimes looked at Minato, how he seemed to become the center of all existence because she willed him to be, and even seeing her gaze without being the focus of it made him freeze like a rabbit who had caught the eyes of a wolf.

Strangely enough, Minato always stared back.)

He hadn’t realized how much more terrifying she could possibly become.

“Alright, how do you tadpoles think that went?” Jiraiya asked, as if they weren’t sitting in the remains of training field seven, or more specifically in one of the large smoking craters their training had left behind.

Haru at that point was still too winded to say anything or think of anything; which probably should be telling Jiraiya exactly how it went.  

Looking over he could see that Minato was still covered in dirt, grime, and river water. His blonde hair was matted with sweat, but those blue eyes were burning and once again Haru realized that Minato wasn’t like him. Minato was halfway between being normal and being Lee and couldn’t be counted on to understand Haru’s own misery and pain.

Lee on the other hand was only looking a bit more ruffled than normal, she had actually tied back her red hair into a single long braid and there was a bit of dirt streaked on her cheek, but she was not drenched in mud or sweat like him and Minato.

“Well, we lasted longer this time.” Minato finally said, when it seemed like none of them were going to answer.

A half hour, the longest yet, but their sensei didn’t look too impressed by that and waved it off with one hand, “Good but not great, when Lee’s been allowed ninjutsu it takes her about ten minutes maximum to find you and bring you both down.”

This was the first time that Jiraiya had actively limited what jutsus she was allowed. He’d taken out her teleportation, her chakra shield, her grabbing jutsu, her clones, and essentially limited her to taijutsu and the very basic academy jutsus.

And they’d still lost.

Minato had done better, considering he was better at taijutsu and usually would win in a straight spar, but then she hadn’t let it be so simple as a straight out spar. Instead she had set up traps throughout the training ground, forcing them into the open while she could take cover in the trees, and then she would sneak in make a few well-placed hits and then use the replacement jutsu and return to the trees without leaving a trace behind. Which left them to step over her buried land mines, her rain of grenades, her hidden spike pits, and everything else in between that no reasonable person should have been able to set up in her given prep time.

What had been described as a game of invading an enemy’s base to retrieve a scroll had instead turned into a game of cat and mouse where each second they failed to reach her base was a second she had to hunt them down and come up with an even more painful and horrific way to dispose of the threats to her defenses.

“Alright then, I’ll tell you how you brats did.” Jiraiya said and as he spoke pointed to each of them.

“Lee-chan, even without your arsenal of terrifyingly overpowered jutsus you still won, but you’re thinking like an assassin. You may have scattered traps throughout your territory but you didn’t check on them, you spent all of your energy and time hunting down the threats you knew about rather than every threat, if I’d wanted to I could have easily walked through while you were distracted and retrieved the scroll. The point wasn’t to get rid of them, it was to defend your territory, understand the difference?”

Haru thought it said a lot about all of them that Lee had been limited on manpower, on ninjutsu, had still won, and Jiraiya still expected her to do better. It also said a lot that neither he nor Minato were protesting that.

“Also, your taijutsu’s still weak. You don’t have time to jab Minato-kun a few times, duck, and then retreat. One hit, Lee-chan, if you start a fight don’t give him time to prepare for another one.”

Haru wondered, looking at her face and the steel in her eyes, if that comment was about her encounter with the jonin rather than with them. Their training exercises had become more complicated, more difficult, since that C-rank and he couldn’t help but feel (as he always felt) that this was due to Lee more than him and Minato.

They were becoming ninja, true ninja, faster than Haru ever imagined or he was ready for and every time he tried to tell someone, shout about it, they just kept pulling further and further ahead leaving him behind.

Jiraiya turned to Minato, “Minato-kun, you did good. In invading unknown and defended territory, with the enemy aware of your presence, you reacted quickly to new traps and stayed mostly on the offensive, always pushing through territory and almost reaching the base. That being said, you played meat shield a little too often for Haru-kun, blocking his hits and staying at the front to test new areas for traps. Where you should have split in half, kept her focused on you and let Haru-kun sneak in from another direction, you two stayed together and after eliminating you she was easily able to eliminate Haru-kun.”

Minato’s cheeks flushed, and he looked away momentarily, and in his eyes Haru could almost hear his thoughts. Minato was very careful not to say it, not as blatantly as Lee, but he was Dead Weight to him as well. They couldn’t split in half, Haru could hear him say, because the moment they did Lee would have gotten Haru in seconds and it still would have been Minato versus Lee.

Dead weight, dead last, dead everything, he could never escape it and with it the feeling that someday it really might be his corpse they were dragging behind because he was too slow to keep up.

Finally, Jiraiya turned to him. And there it was, that hesitation he always got when he talked to Haru. Where he tried to think of something to say that was just as good as what he’d said to Lee or Minato but just couldn’t quite manage it. Instead Haru was the normal one, the one who kept them sane, not the one who would win the fight or complete the mission but the one who would keep them from going off the rails. Once, just once, he would like to be the overpowered one.

“Haru-kun, you didn’t question orders given to you, and you worked well with Minato as a team.” Jiraiya started, which just meant that Haru had shut up and followed all of Minato’s ideas because Minato’s ideas were always better and seemed to work more against Lee.

“That being said this was a team exercise against an enemy that you outnumbered and while Minato took the lead you should have been watching his back and deflecting Lee while he disabled traps. Standing there and being kicked into trees by enemy shinobi because you weren’t prepared isn’t an option. You have to pay attention, be in a good stance, and watch for her.” A week ago sensei wouldn’t have said it quite like that, they’d still been doing D-ranks and were given time to grow, but there wasn’t any coddling anymore as he’d put it. Time was ticking and they were all moving at Eru Lee’s pace now.

But Haru had never been able to move at Eru Lee’s pace; even when they had just started the academy.

He was just so tired of being last and useless.

Jiaraiya smiled, clapped his hands together, which always meant he was about to say something terrible, “Alright, since that took much less time than I expected we’re going to do it again, but this time reversed. Minato-kun and Haru-kun, you have thirty minutes to set up your base and traps and then I set Lee-chan loose on you all.”

Haru wanted to die.

* * *

There was no such thing as a retired hokage.

Perhaps there should have been, no doubt had Tobirama lived to face another war as an aged man he would have passed the position to Hiruzen before he had had no choice in the matter. But as it was neither he nor Hashirama had been given enough time, everything since the very founding of Konoha had been rushed, there had been a need to instill tradition and to merge the clans into something cohesive and unified, there had been no time to sit and think of a life after hokage.

Retirement, he was finding, did not suit him very well.

For the moment thoughts of returning Tsunade to the village and reprimanding her for her unbelievable selfishness (because they had all faced loss and death beyond imagination and endurance) was his short term goal. Beyond that…

Hiruzen was now hokage, and he would respect that, he would allow Hiruzen to see to the running of his village and of attempting to maintain the peace after the second war had finally come to a close. As a retired hokage this was no longer his business, he was at best a jonin once again, and he would respect that.

(Not to mention he had been dead long enough that he had lost the context of everything, the intricacies of politics both within and outside of Konoha, everything had changed and shifted slightly so as to leave him out of place.)

But he was not on the missions roster, he had no official position beyond that of retired hokage, and whenever he stepped into tactics, intelligence, research and development, anywhere they would all stop and stare and splutter at his recent resurrection and get absolutely nothing done.

“Oh, nidaime-sama” They would say with a deep bow filled with respect and that would be the end of anything productive.

Perhaps it was simply because of that, because of the pressing need to do something more than listlessly wander the village and stare at surprised familiar faces and unfamiliar children, that he found himself in Hiruzen’s student’s laboratory most afternoons.

Or perhaps it was because Orochimaru was in some way responsible for Tobirama and his brother’s current state of affairs and seeing him might give Tobirama the insight he needed to decide how he felt about the situation. Because this was not a simple problem with simple solutions, the only clear thing now was that things had changed, and that no one had quite realized it yet.

As if one was suddenly standing in the eye of a hurricane, hearing the wind and sea roaring about them, but having no idea what it would mean to feel it against their skin. 

There were two worlds that haunted his vision.

One, a world in which death was obsolete, where dying was a choice rather than a necessity and there was no task left unfinished and none who were left behind without a choice. This was a world in which there was no war because there was no need for it, no point in it. Because how could you win a war when you could not count on casualties to wear down the other’s defenses? A place where child soldiers were a thing of the past if only because there was no need for children to be pushed through the ranks to replace shinobi who had not died. A place where a father could reassure his children that he would come home again to see them regardless of how a mission went.

But there was another world, a world where there was no death and one must serve the village forever without choice or hope for freedom. Or a world where immortality came at a price for select clans, those who proved useful enough to the village, or else those who had enough money to curry favor with the kage.

This world was far easier for Tobirama to envision than the other but at the same time he was torn between them.

He was torn if only because these futures stemmed not from an idealistic dreamer like his brother, whose dreams were so powerful they bent reality to fit his visions, nor from a ruthless corrupt kage hardened by war and death, who had use for an army of the immortal dead, but instead from a child who wanted nothing more than free ramen for eternity.

That, beyond listless retirement and vague interest in Hiruzen’s students, was what drove him to Orochimaru’s state of the art laboratory where he could often find the genin Eru Lee.

“ _England?_ Why would someone like you care about a boring shinobiless place like that?” Eru Lee was seated cross legged on the gleaming silver table that Tobirama suspected was intended for the dissection of her clones.

(After meeting his student’s students he’d had a long talk with Hiruzen about what exactly he had done to make one an outrageous pervert who publicly would spy on women’s bathouses and seemed proud of it and to make the other an insane and possibly homicidal scientist who seemed constantly on the verge of experiments so monstrous he should be put to death.

Hiruzen hadn’t managed to find an answer but only vaguely agreed that something should be done about both of them; but not by him.)

With one open hand she was continually performing what she had named ‘the grabbing jutsu’ to summon a kunai into her fingertips and then without blinking, flinching, or missing throw it back into the dead center of a target across the room. With the other she would perform whatever ninjutsu technique Orochimaru would distractedly call out when he wasn’t too caught up in his own research (which usually happened to be attempts to recreate or improve upon Tobirama’s edo tensei, which Tobirama did not necessarily appreciate).

England, the very syllables sounded foreign, translated badly in his own thoughts. Vowels dropped from existence, the word became clipped and thrown together, where he would accentuate the u sound she only hinted at its presence and easily stepped over it to the l.

He answered her with raised eyebrows at her casual tone, which wasn’t quite disrespectful but wasn’t properly submissive either, and was somehow strangely refreshing for it, “Simply because I have never heard of the land of _England_ and having once been a kage I like to be familiar with other nations. Even ones without shinobi such as the Land of Iron.”

Not to mention that ever since his resurrection he had become very interested in the Eru clan and its origins.

(“Can you imagine, Tobi, what she would have been like in the clan wars. Teleportation, an army of clones, perfect resurrection of the dead… She’s completed all of your greatest techniques at the age of twelve.” Hashirama had said, musing of a bottle of sake, Mito long since having left them for the night with a chaste kiss against Hashirama’s brow looking so terribly old and weary; as if she was their mother rather than his sister-in-law.

He’d simply swirled the cup of sake, stared into its depths and the fire reflected in them, and thought about the boundless potential of one mysterious clanless girl who had simply shown up one day in an orphanage.

And he’d thought about the Eru clan that no one had ever heard of and the village of Surrey which no one had ever seen.)

“It’s just _England_ , land itself is kind of in the name.” She responded distractedly as she tried to increase the power of her throw, distracting him out of his own thoughts.

“What do you mean?”

“ _Land_ the last part of _England_ , it means land. So it’s sort of like Land of Fire already, just land of… The _English_ I guess.” She frowned and then shrugged as if this was ultimately unimportant.

There were reports of the girl speaking an entirely different language from the one spoken in all of the elemental nations and while he had heard that it still took hearing that explanation of a foreign word to understand that it was true.

“Anything else about _England_?” He asked, butchering its name as he did so, as he knew he would.

She frowned, stopped throwing for a moment, twirled the kunai between her fingers as if it was a pen then said, “There were no shinobi, everyone had civilian level chakra levels at best… I didn’t really get out much since I spent most of the time locked in a cupboard or else doing D-ranks. It’s mildish weather, but it rains a lot, it’s an island… That’s about it.”

Locked in a cupboard or else doing D-ranks; with Eru Lee that could mean many things. He’d met with the girl a few times and he was torn between finding her brilliant or else a complete idiot; she reminded him of his brother in that way only… more so. There was no doubt that the techniques she’d developed, as a genin, were improvements upon his own S-ranked techniques (hiraishin without fuinjutsu, edo tensei without sacrifice and DNA, perfectly realistic human clones that bled when you cut them) but in having a conversation with her she was infuriatingly thick to the point where she made grown men want to punch her through a wall.

(Having taken a brief glance through her academy files he found that the chunin who had worked with her for years all faced the same dilemma and none of them managed to come to a consensus.)

“And your clan?”

“My clan? You mean the Dursleys?” Here she grimaced as if this word was on par with calling someone’s mother a whore; as if the word itself was sour tasting.

(Dursulees, but again that wasn’t quite right, he was adding in syllables again but couldn’t quite find how to remove them…)

“If that’s your clan.” He said, waiting for her to elaborate and her expression of distaste didn’t leave.

“Well, I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call them my clan, considering they didn’t exist in the first place and instead were part of an elaborate if ineffective genjutsu placed over reality but I guess we are… technically related.” Here she shuddered as if this was the greatest curse that ever could be placed on a human being. Before he could ask what she meant by a genjutsu and her clan being part of one she continued on in a fast and almost bored tone.

“Well, let’s see. Uncle Vernon is very fat and works for Grunnings the hardware company that sells electronic overpriced drills. He turns an interesting shade of purple when upset, has an unhealthy fear of ninjutsu, and also likes to threaten to send me to the orphanage if I’m not behaving properly and bringing more shame and dishonor to the family than usual on any given day. He also keeps raising my goddamn interest, or did, I suppose until I finally decided to go to just go to an orphanage.” She sighed, tilting her head to the side, her green eyes considering Tobirama and his response taking in his bewilderment over the words she was saying with something akin to impatience. As if to say keep up, Tobirama, are you too slow to keep up?

(The terrible part about that expression was that he knew he often was the one who gave it to others; his brother had been on the receiving end far too many times to count.)

“Your interest?” He asked, interrupting her.

“I worked as an indentured servant to the Dursleys. I think they owned the car my parents were in during the wreck and I needed to pay off the debt; of course that was never really explained in detail and whenever I asked it always brought on the purple wrath of Uncle Vernon but I like to think I can put two and two together. Anyway, given how many D-ranks I was doing I should have paid it off long before my fifth birthday so they must have been charging interest.” She said, as if this was all a perfectly reasonable explanation that was quite simple to understand and didn’t require any further details.

“Right, anyway, moving on. Aunt Petunia is named after a flower, likes to shower affection and praise over Dudders, and likes to belittle my own achievements as much as possible in order to make Dudders the whale look artificially superior. Dudders is my fat useless cousin who likes getting new things, eating an enormous amount of food, and being too stupid and useless to function properly.” She stopped then, cut herself off, and dully appraised him, “That’s it.”

“And none of them were shinobi?” He asked.

“I told you, there are no shinobi in _England_.” She said, dropping the kunai so her hands could flail more properly, “Maybe Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris, but they only do taijutsu so it doesn’t really count, does it?”

“Even your parents?”

She blinked and actually seemed somewhat surprised by the question, “Well, I don’t really know, given that they died and all… If they were then they must have been only genin level at best since a car crash killed them. Given that I never met a single shinobi in _Little_ _Whinging_ ever though I highly doubt it.”

He didn’t believe though, that a girl with chakra that seemed unlimited and whose ninjutsu could replicate the most complicated of fuinjutsu and kinjutsu, came from parents whose chakra levels were that of genin.

She believed what she was saying, that was clear enough. In its own way this was good, it tied her to the village, never had there been any sign of Eru Lee wanting to return to her own village and clan. That being said he couldn’t believe that the Eru clan simply did not exist.  

He was about to press further when one of her clones reached its breaking point.

It happened more or less every other time he stepped into the laboratory, particularly if the Namikaze boy was out, as he was today, picking up the take out ramen that Lee had deemed necessary for her sessions with Orochimaru.

This was also the other reason he often found himself in Orochimaru’s lab. The man’s experiments rested somewhere between the borders of brilliant and horrifying and only the fact that he was experimenting on a twelve year old genin’s life like clones, as well as that he really was doing breakthrough research, stopped Tobirama from throwing him into the deepest cells Konoha’s shinobi prison had to offer. As it was he always found himself mildly disturbed and on edge and always with the need to watch and observe and keep him in line.

“I’m Eru Lee and I like supporting Orochimaru through emotionally difficult times in his life, goddammit!”

Tobirama and the original Lee both looked to their left where they spied a rather irate Orochimaru hunched over a notebook, drawing seals and dutifully ignoring the cry of rage from the girl standing on his desk with a clip board in hand as if about to smash it over his head.

(“Oh, I kind of liked Emotional Support Lee.” Lee said somewhat sadly, as if she had just broken a well-liked pencil, “It’ll be a shame to have to make a new one.”

Tobirama wasn’t quite sure why, since he was fairly certain that Emotional Support Lee was the one she’d replaced five times already. After the first time he’d watched Orochimaru casually feed a clone to his snake summons he’d learned not to get too attached to any particular clone.)

“I can’t take it anymore! What is the point of living if my own purpose is unattainable?!” This apparently was not a rhetorical question as she waited for Orochimaru to answer in tense silence, when he refused she brought the clip board down only for it to be tossed from her hands by Orochimaru’s in a quick fluid movement.

“Every day I suffer through, seeing a glimmer of hope on the horizon, and every night that glimmer dims like the sun setting and I console myself thinking that tomorrow will be the day. Tomorrow will be the day that I end, that my existence is complete.” Here she leaned in close to the man, close enough to take his face in her hands and cradle it, and she said softly in the tone of a jonin inching in towards the personal kill, “We are not like you, Orochimaru-sama. We do not scramble for meaning with all the desperation of drowning men. We have one, clear, attainable task in our lives and once it is completed we lose all necessity. That is what it means to be a clone.”

Finally, Orochimaru appeared to give up, he set down his notebook with a sigh and with raised eyebrows considered the clone, “Are you asking to be fed to Manda?”

“No, I am asking you to play nice with others, leave your creepy laboratory every once in a while, and find some new hobbies besides torturing clones and scribbling. Is that so very difficult, Orochimaru?”

(Tobirama wasn’t sure if he should be pleased, horrified, or mildly irritated that his own sentiments were being voiced and enforced by Eru Lee’s clones.)

Evidently it was because he did not even bother to respond, rather returned to his studies silently, and as he did so the fury of the clone became palpable. Eru Lee’s clones were not as powerful as she herself was, Orochimaru had tested and confirmed that with Tobirama witness to some of the experiments, but never the less the way the clone was holding itself and leaking killer intent was enough for her to be mistaken for a highly skilled chunin at least. With a single outstretched hand the clone summoned the kunai into hers.

It always made him think back to the girl herself, who seemed so serene and indifferent to everything, and wonder just what she was truly capable of.

It was at this point, normally, that the clone would either attempt to kill Orochimaru or else kill itself with the kunai. And even knowing that it was a clone, that it was equivalent to his own shadow clones, the sight of her unseeing eyes and blood would always haunt him long after the body had been disposed of.

However, Emotional Support Lee seemed to have reached some other conclusion, because she merely threw the kunai expertly into the wall, watched as it embedded itself there and then walked out taking her massive killing intent with her.

“… That’s probably not good.” Lee summarized bluntly and then with uncanny speed for a genin she abandoned her post to follow after a possibly rampaging clone leaving Tobirama and Orochimaru behind.

“Out of curiosity, you haven’t managed to complete my impure world resurrection technique, correct?” Tobirama asked, to which Orochimaru seethed silently, and he felt that while the world had turned on its head so long as that remained true he could more or less sleep easily at night. 

* * *

The last person Haru ever wanted to see found him at the little red bridge in training field seven staring glumly out into the water.

He’d been spending most of the morning at the bridge trying to finally come to some sort of decision. He didn’t need the chunin exams to tell him what he’d known since that first evaluation in the academy.

Lee showing up now, staring at him and cocking her head, just confirmed that conclusion, “Maybe I’m just not meant to be a ninja, maybe I was supposed to be a merchant or a ramen chef or anything but a shinobi.”

Lee didn’t say anything, merely moved to stand next to him on the bridge, staring at the slow moving stream that ran through the training ground.

“I mean, it wasn’t like I didn’t know that I wasn’t talented. I just thought, maybe if I tried hard enough or worked at it long enough, I could be better and… help people I guess. I guess what I’m saying is that ever since we got back from the C-rank, and training has gotten more intense, I feel like I’m being left behind.”

He waited for Lee to agree, like she always did, and call him Dead Last and confirm every bad thing he’d ever said about himself. She didn’t say anything though, and then he turned to look at her and found her really looking back, actually staring at him and seeing him for the first time since he’d met her. And her eyes, they weren’t the steel daggers he’d come to expect, they were deep and somehow warm.

“Haru, you’re looking at it from all of the wrong angles.”

“What?” He hadn’t even realized that Lee knew his name, or how those words were an insult because it had to be insulting somehow.

Lee gave him a look that was at once exasperated but lacked her usual cutting edge, instead it was a look that she often gave Minato, one that was softer and more patient than she gave to anyone else.

“What you see in Minato and I isn’t power, it’s potential. Minato and I have the potential to be great shinobi, someday, but we aren’t yet. At the moment we’d be mildly decent chunin, if that, put us against Jiraiya or any competent jonin in true combat and we wouldn’t stand a chance. You’ve seen that already.” She said motioning to her ribcage and before he could interrupt that he wasn’t anywhere close to comparing them to the sannin she continued, “Perhaps you’ll never catch up to Minato and I, perhaps you’ll always be three steps behind, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t have the potential to be a jonin either. You’re thinking too shortsighted, you have to look beyond where you are now and see what can be, if you keep trying.”

“So, what, I should just keep trying and keep being dead last?”

“Of course, every team needs a dead last.” She said, as if this was obvious, “Otherwise every mission we’d have would end in disaster.”

When it was clear he didn’t understand she gave him that wry half Lee smile, “Dead last, Haru, is the one who makes sure we don’t burn down hotels.”

Suddenly Haru realized that was what Jiraiya had been trying to say the whole time, badly, but still trying. Haru would probably never be the best at strategy, taijutsu, ninjutsu, or genjutsu but he could be the best at common sense and keeping them from going too far. He could be the voice of reason, and while he may be bad now he had still passed the academy test, he could still pass the chunin exams someday, and it was okay to be a jonin and not be Minato or Lee.

He felt a smile grow on his face but before it could take over he asked the one question that had been bothering him during this entire conversation, “Why are you telling me this?”

The half-smile grew into a full grin and with far too much exuberance she claimed, “I’m Eru Lee and I like supporting… people… through emotionally difficult times in their lives!”

Had Lee, had she just made a joke? He found his smile growing and he started laughing, “You sound just like one of your clones! You know, thanks Lee… I actually, I actually feel a lot better…”

Then looking back out at the stream with a newfound hope in his future he said, “You know, we should actually hang out some time, I mean after training. I just feel like there’s this whole other side of you that I…”

Abruptly she cut him off.

“I’m afraid this is the end, Haru-kun. For you see, in aiding you my purpose has been fulfilled. I have provided emotional support for…someone in their time of need. I no longer have a reason to exist.” He turned to her and found her staring at him a bittersweet smile decorating her lips yet somehow failing to reach her empty eyes, “Goodbye, Haru-kun.”

And then, without hesitation, she threw herself over the bridge and into the river where she disappeared from sight.

“…Lee?” He asked quietly, watching the ripples where she had disappeared, and didn’t reappear (as if she had never existed in the first place).

“Lee?” He asked, louder and more desperate, and before he knew it he was climbing the railing and preparing to dive in but before he took the plunge a voice sounded from behind him. A very familiar voice.

“Oh, Dead Last, have you seen Emotional Support Lee anywhere recently? Orochimaru drove her insane and I thought she might have gone on a murderous rampage. I mean, so far everything looks good but you never know…”

He turned to look back and found both Lee and Minato staring at her, each with a bowl of ramen in hand, and then he looked back to the water and managed to put two and two together.

And he wanted to scream.

* * *

“Alright squirts, it’s a big day today, we’re going on our second C-rank!”

There was a distinct lack of excitement from his three genin.

Although, to be honest Jiraiya was just about as thrilled about it as his students looked. It wasn’t that it had gone badly, it had actually gone rather well, it was simply that the aspect that had gone south hadn’t been resolved.

There had been no sign of the enemy ninja since Lee’s confrontation and with that it had left no witnesses behind, only Lee herself with a wound that could have been lethal if it had only managed to dig a little deeper.

What was more disturbing than the actual confrontation itself was what it meant.

There was a leak in Konoha and it was high up in the chain of command. Someone out there knew that Eru Lee was not an ordinary genin and had sought to eliminate her before she could become a true S-ranked threat. Someone out there hadn’t bought the Orochimaru explanation for the return of the hokages.

It could be someone inside Konoha, it could be an enemy village, but whoever it was had been very careful to cover their tracks. Either way, Konoha’s secrets weren’t Konoha’s secrets and somehow Jiraiya was going to have to fish out the rat before something truly disastrous occurred.

He looked at his kunoichi then, knowing that she had realized this most likely as soon as the blade had entered her side, and acknowledged that they had left the job unfinished.

In the village she was more or less safe, he could train her and see that she could stand her ground against most enemies and prepare her and the boys to be exceptional chunin, but as soon as they stepped outside of the village and Jiraiya let himself get distracted it was open season.

Until they found their assassin, the leak, every C-rank Lee took now had the possibility of becoming A-ranked.

And judging by Minato’s expression, the steel in his normally cheerful blue eyes, he was aware of this as well. Haru just looked slightly nauseous at the idea of promotion, or anything to do with Lee in general, and hadn’t seemed to realize the real source of concern. But that was fine, Haru could stay in the dark as long as he needed to, these weren’t matters most genin should be concerned with anyway.

“It’ll be fine, promise, we’re just going to bring someone back to the village, and we’ll even have some company.”  Jiraiya said, with a convincing winning smile that Jiraiya normally used when trying to convince either of his teammates for a night on the town (it usually didn’t work).

None of their expressions changed as they continued to stare at him and he was forced to admit defeat by simply sighing, “Come on, we need to get to the hokage’s office, you can learn all the details there.”

“Just as long as there aren’t any plant zombies.” Lee said following Jiraiya with a worn casualness that didn’t disguise her anxiety.

Of course just because Lee said that Jiraiya had the feeling that the entire mission to retrieve Tsunade would be doomed to catastrophe even with the nidaime tagging along so he could bitch at his grand-niece for abandoning the village. Because somehow, Lee always managed to turn the simplest things like D-ranks and C-ranks into something worthy of ANBU’s attention.

He supposed it was just part of her charm.


	6. The Yggdrasil

_In which Lee discovers her possible origins, Jiraiya reminds everyone that he’s a super pervert, and the plant zombies return._

* * *

There was no moon that night, everything was black, and in the darkness she could only hear the rushing of the river over the sound of her own heartbeat 

But she was not listening for the river, instead the rustling of leaves, the splash of a footstep, some sign of her approaching pursuer.

There was nothing though, only her own breathing, and the endless night.

* * *

Like their first C-ranked mission outside of the village, their second started deceptively easy, as if it truly was C-ranked.

They went at a brisk, genin level pace, that Haru could keep up with more or less towards a small village at the edge of the Land of Fire. Minato spent most of the time talking with Lee and sending furtive glances over towards the glowering and mostly silent nidaime.

Minato had actually seen and even talked with the nidaime a fair amount since the man seemed to spend most of his time in Orochimaru’s lab. It was unclear whether he was bored or (like Minato) he didn’t trust the Snake Sanin around Lee. Regardless, usually when Minato showed up to make sure nothing was on fire the nidaime was there too.

He was a very serious person but he wasn’t unkind. He’d talk to Minato about various jutsus and had at some point even offered to get him started on fuinjutsu, something he thought Minato might do well in. He was just… different than Jiraiya or even Orochimaru, more well balanced as a person even as a genius.

Minato had never seen him this angry before.

Everyone felt it, the acrid waves of dread in the air that made your hair stand on end and your breath run cold, that thing shinobi had labeled as killing intent. He could tell by the way Haru lingered in the back of the group (and not just because of his running speed) and Jiraiya spent most of his time looking at the nidaime with raised eyebrows and then ahead at the horizon with that hapless look of resignation that he usually got when Lee said she had a new and brilliant idea.

Minato almost felt bad for Senju Tsunade because even if she’d heard that the shodaime and nidaime had returned she couldn’t possibly be prepared for whatever the nidaime had planned.

Lee, for her own part, didn’t seem too bothered. Or at least, she didn’t seem bothered by the second hokage’s impending meltdown, instead her eyes would flicker to the trees and her pale fingers would tap impatiently on the kunai she’d tied to her waist.

“Do you really think he’ll show up?” Minato asked.

“I would.” Lee responded, which could mean anything given that most people were not Lee and probably wouldn’t make the decisions she’d make.

“Even with the nidaime and Jiraiya-sensei?”

She didn’t respond for a moment, considering this, probably considering what she would do if she was trying to kill Eru Lee and had to go through the resurrected second hokgae and one of the sannin to do it. Finally she said, “It’d be easier if they weren’t here but at the same time…”

It wouldn’t stop Lee, but then nothing ever did, not when she truly wanted something or believed in it. What Lee wanted, what she truly wanted, never seemed outside of her grasp and she went after it with an intensity that barely seemed human. And true, the best shinobi, the ones you heard about and remembered, were supposedly like that but at the same time…

At the same time most people weren’t like Lee.

They had limits.

And fighting off Jiraiya and Senju Tobirama alone was something that would push beyond almost any jonin’s limits.

The subject had more or less been closed after that, neither of them agreeing, Lee still eyeing the trees and Minato more or less convincing himself that Lee’s regenerating jonin would know better than to make a reappearance.

And for the first day, it’d seemed like this was the case, but Lee had an uncanny ability to be right about things that she had no business being right about. It sometimes made him worry about her saying reality was a giant ineffective genjutsu, because while he liked to believe he was a real person in a real world and nothing had convinced him he wasn’t there was still that nagging suspicion of Lee just saying it might be enough.

But it was merely waiting, waiting until they made camp, until they were in one position and unlikely to move for some time. Waiting until they had more or less forgotten its existence.

“Sensei, how do you know where Tsunade-sama is, I mean since she left the village.” Haru asked, curled in on himself with his head resting on his knees, seeming to forget that any mention of Tsunade just added one more notch to the intensity of the nidaime’s killer intent.

“Well, that’s what we ninja do, Haru-kun.” Jiraiya said before waving his hand elaborating, “But Tsunade hasn’t made it all that difficult by racking up a gambling debt large enough to buy a village not to mention her… drinking habit…” Jiraiya seemed to realize what he was saying then as the killing intent (always there and never quite gone) once again intensified.

Minato wondered if Tsunade shouldn’t be afraid of what was coming, because no matter how much the nidaime insisted, surely with that kind of bubbling resentment it wasn’t just a talk he wanted.

“Gambling and drinking,” Tobirama said dully his red eyes narrowing, “She left the village to gamble and drink.”

“Well, not only, gamble and drink… She does other things.” Jiraiya protested, somewhat weakly, before quickly changing the topic by adding, “But we’re fetching her back anyway so none of this is actually going to be a problem.”

It was at this point that Lee abruptly stood, in that too fast manner that always looked a bit unnerving, and once more stared out into the trees and fingered her kunai. She stood there, silently, leaving the rest of them to watch her with raised eyebrows.

“Got a problem, Lee-chan?” Jiraiya asked, his own eyes flickering towards the tree line, but Lee still didn’t answer just kept staring ahead.

Before anyone could ask anything else, before Minato could ask, Lee turned back towards them with a more or less cheerful smile and said, “I have to go do bathroom women things. I’ll be back.”

She then gave Minato a rather shrewd and pointed look before it inexplicably disappeared and she was frolicking off into the trees and out of sight.

“Bathroom women things?” Jiraiya asked, looking at Minato as if Minato would know the answer. Which, Minato might know Lee best and be able to translate most of what she said, but even he didn’t know everything.

“I thought you would be an expert on that, Toad Sage.” The nidaime said, his eyes narrowed at their sensei.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jiraiya spluttered.

“Simply that you have quite the reputation as an expert on women in bathrooms.” The nidaime replied, seeming perfectly calm but his chakra still boiling beneath.

“That is not a woman!” Jiraiya said, pointing off to the trees where Lee had gone, and Minato wondered if it was normal to feel the great bout of relief at the idea that Jiraiya apparently had no interest in seeing Lee without clothes.

“Should we be letting her go off like that?” Haru asked, looking out to where Lee had left.

“I’d normally say no, especially under these conditions, but our friend and honored guest the nidaime is known for his tracking abilities. As long as she doesn’t go too far for too long we’ll know where she is and what condition she’s in and we’ll also know if anyone else is coming.”

Minato did sit there for a few minutes, but when a few minutes began to stretch to ten and the silence became almost deafening he stood, brushed off his clothing and said, “I’m going to bring her back.”

“If she’s naked try not to look directly at her, use the corner of your eye, that way you can say that you didn’t mean it.” Jiraiya helpfully suggested which Minato just pretended he hadn’t heard because he was still pretending he didn’t know that his sensei was actually a ridiculous pervert who went out of his way to see women naked.

Except before he could get anywhere he was met with a solid invisible wall just outside the light of the fire. He reached out, touched it, it was cold and sort of rubbery feeling but even as he touched it he couldn’t actually see it. He reached out and touched it again, and as he did so he saw something slam soundlessly from the other side.

White, curling, diseased looking vines that almost looked like oversized worms for all their movement were creeping towards them with vigor, ramming against the shield almost with desperation.

“Sensei,” He said, with a calmness that seemed to cause him to drift outside of himself, as if Minato wasn’t looking at this and thinking of what the hell white vines moving like that could mean, “We might have a problem.”

And at that point, something slammed against the shield that was strong enough to break through.

* * *

Lee had been hoping there was only one of it, that would have made things easier, because if there had been one then it would have taken the bait and come after her leaving Jiraiya to keep an eye on Minato and later put two and two together and come as backup.

But there was more than one, it had regenerating zombie plant friends, and those had stayed behind to distract (or deal with) Jiraiya, the nidaime, Dead Last, and Minato.

Only one had come after her.

Or at least, only one she’d seen.

As soon as she was out of the sight of the camp, after she’d left a shield around the place like a bubble preventing anything else from getting in, it’d come out of the brush and immediately started in with taijutsu.

And her taijutsu was better than it used to be, she was holding up better than before when at the first opening it had had a kunai in her ribs, but she wasn’t fast enough and every second she failed to kill it was a second closer it was to killing her.

And every time she mustered enough concentration to perform a jutsu powerful enough to blow it up all at once (to light it on fire, to disintegrate it, to do something) it was always moving in for the next blow leaving her only time to duck out of the way.

So she only had time to duck, dodge, and keep it on its feet enough so that it couldn’t obliterate her with ninjutsu either.

Something like panic was entering her, because if she failed now, then it was the end. There would be nothing, her existence would have ended meaninglessly. More than that, what would happen to Minato. Without her he very well could die. The idea of her own death brought her despair but the idea of Minato’s death wedged something darker and deeper into her heart; something she didn’t dare to contemplate.

(Minato must not die, even more than she herself must avoid death, Minato couldn’t be allowed to die.)

With that thought she managed to force it back, an explosion causing it to slide backwards (not stumble, it never stumbled, it flowed and reshaped but it did nothing so human as stumbling) and give her enough space to face it.

(And it was so silent, eerily so, perfectly aware of its role as an assassin, so much that she didn’t even bother to ask who it was or where it came from or why it wanted her dead.)

Trying an old but true technique she lit it on fire, watching as the bright white inextinguishable flames consumed it. When it seemed as if there was nothing left of it, only a pile of grey ash she turned, and in that moment found a kunai thrust into her chest as she stared into the yellow pupil less eyes of her attacker and its pale misshapen face.

(It must have been subconscious, the act of teleportation then, that brought her into the river where she would pull the kunai out and listen to her own damaged erratic heartbeat and will it to continue.

Because now was not the time to burn out, to die, there were things she had to do and protect and it was not time to leave yet…

Even as her thoughts blurred, the night remained silent, and the sound of her heart grew feeble and finally stopped altogether.

Somewhere in the distance she heard the sound of splashing as her body hit the water.)

* * *

Lee had said that there was nothing like fighting against a jonin seriously.

“It’s like the world bends to them, like everything is involved in this fight, and taijutsu, genjutsu, every kind of jutsu just merges together into one flowing movement.” She’d said after one of their training sessions, leaning against him as they sat on top of Tobirama’s carved head, staring into the sunset, “There’s no time to marvel at a grand jutsu, everything is lightning… Speed, Minato, it’s speed and not power that decides the battle.”

And in this first real fight that Minato was witnessing, was caught in himself, he recognized that it really was speed and not power that made the difference. True, they were more powerful than him, but it was the way they used their jutsus in succession and never stayed caught in one position that made them lethal.

Jiraiya, Senju Tobirama, and their attackers.

Lee was right about another thing, they weren’t human, in good lighting they didn’t even look remotely human. They were pale, misshapen, like humans but with joints and bones in the wrong places and jagged shark like grins. And their limbs moved like vines, twisting this way and that, and always moving leaving Minato on his toes as he made use of the few ninjutsu techniques he knew but mostly taijutsu to keep himself away from the fighting and throwing in kunai (which appeared to have no effect at all) when he could.

And in the corner of his eye he’d watch the nidaime perform suiton jutsus that would rip holes through their bodies (only for the bodies to reform) and see Jiraiya tear through another pair with fuinjutsu.

(And he wanted to just watch them, to see the best in action, see what it meant to be among the greatest jonin in Konoha. But there wasn’t time and it was all he could do to keep his own head on his shoulders.)

Then, all at once, he noticed the numbers dwindling and then there were none left their bodies disintegrated by Jiraiya and the nidaime leaving Minato to stand their winded and listening to his heartbeat pounding in his ears.

His eyes flickered over to Haru, who seemed more or less intact, he was bleeding but he was still standing and alive.

Then he looked back up towards the horizon, a weight dropping into his stomach and his heartbeat doubling, “Lee!”

* * *

There was the scent of grass on a warm breeze and opening her eyes she found herself not staring into the black night but instead into glowing branches of a great tree. They were golden, but a soft gold, like half-remembered sunlight and in the dark they seemed like the veins of the universe.

Sitting upright and turning her head she saw the tree itself, saw the golden glow flowing upwards, constantly moving, up into the branches and the leaves and that in the leaves round pink fruit hung, swaying in that soft breeze.

“ _Yggdrasil_.”

Standing immediately and turning, kunai appearing in her hand from nothingness, she faced the owner of the voice prepared for her next battle. It was then that she remembered that there should be a hole where her heart was, she should be in a river, and that somewhere her sandals had gone missing leaving her feet bare against the blades of grass.

Blades that had no business feeling so soft and real against her skin.

Sitting a few yards from her on one of the great sprawling roots of the tree was a man dressed in black, no not black but very dark colors, so that in the light of the tree they were almost indistinguishable from black. It was an odd design too; one she couldn’t place as English or one from the Land of Fire. It was like a kimono, but with more layers, thicker and frayed at the edges as if this fabric had seen him through years of hardship.

His hair was like an Uchiha’s sticking out as if it was made from raven’s feathers and his face seemed to have no color at all. But his eyes, his eyes were green, the greenest eyes she’d ever seen. Like they weren’t eyes at all but something else, something made of leaves in high summer.

They were her eyes.

“Where am I? Who are you? What is this place?” She asked, brooking no argument, not waiting for any excuse.

He said nothing for a moment, merely considered her, as if he had all the time the universe had to offer sprawling before him. As if she was not wearing a hitaei, holding a kunai, and in a position to strike.

Then he smiled, a soft kind thing that she had never seen before, yet one that wasn’t innocent of grief and rage either. It was the smile that only a jonin could give, only someone who had seen death beyond imagination, but one that few could find it within themselves to give. An intrinsically sweet and sorrowful expression.

It was in a soft voice, the same as before, yet one that echoed with power and intent that he said, “Those are not easy questions to answer.”

He motioned next to him, to the branch, and said, “Perhaps it would be best if you were sitting, I find standing for these types of conversations makes me impatient and unwilling to listen.”

She eyed him warily, still holding the kunai, and his eyes flicked towards the metal as if understanding her unspoken threat and in them she could see a flash of amusement, “There are greater things to fear in this world than blood and death.”

With trepidation she allowed the kunai to disintegrate, keeping watch on his hands and waiting for the seals, but they remained still and where she could plainly see them. Then, slowly, she walked over towards the branch and, leaving a fair amount of space between them, sat down.

When she sat he tilted his head up towards the branches, their glow reflected in his eyes, and said calmly, “In regards to your first question the answer is difficult merely because we are not in a true place. We are in the world between worlds, the realm between life and death, the train station called Purgatory. Or at least, it was always a train station for me, until I boarded the train…”

“So I am dead then.” Lee said, flatly, feeling something in her curl at those words and the man’s eyes flickered to hers and considered her again, looking for something in her but he didn’t answer yes or no.

Instead he continued, “I am not from this dimension, this universe, I come from very far away… Further than I once ever imagined possible. As for who I am… It has been so long since anyone has asked, a thousand years at least...”

He frowned, looked down from the tree, and then as he looked directly into his eyes he said, “I am Death.”

“You’re the Shinigami.” She said and she had heard of the death god’s existence but had expected something far different than this man sitting across from her. Something sharper, no because this man had that edge that all kages had, that overwhelming chakra that was being sheathed for civility’s sake. She had expected something… different.

“The Destroyer of Worlds.” He confirmed, as if this was a great pun at his own expense, the worlds he had destroyed glittering in his eyes.

“But for your third question… I had expected a train station, but somewhere on the way the train forgot itself and turned into a winding path, this path in turn led me to the roots of the Tree of Life. And then you yourself arrived not long after, and here we are, staring into the very architecture of existence.”

She stared up towards the tree, the Tree of Life, and felt that it was an apt enough name. She didn’t know how or why but she knew this tree and the golden glow it emitted, the way it pushed its energy out into the world surrounding them.

“You called it something else before.” She commented as she stared up into the branches and he nodded.

“ _Yggdrasil_ ,” He repeated and then added in that same distracted tone, “The World Tree.”

“It’s beautiful.” She heard herself say, distantly, and it was but she didn’t know why she’d felt the need to say it.

“I had forgotten that there were such beautiful things in the world.” The man, the Shinigami, agreed in a way that made it sound as if that very thought both saddened and delighted him.

And in that moment she found herself staring at him, truly staring, taking in the curve of his face, the paleness of his skin which seemed to almost glow in the golden light, the texture of his hair, and those green eyes. Over his image she superimposed her own image, the one she’d seen in various reflections, and found that they were a closer match than any she had ever seen before.

Almost as if he could be her father.

(And she felt something in her flicker on then, as if a thousand unasked questions had been answered, and her whole view of the world and her place in it had changed and shifted and the name James Potter ceased to have any true meaning.)

Swallowing thickly she put thoughts of this aside and said, “I want to go back, need to, I still… I still have things to do. I can’t be dead yet.”

He blinked over at her and said simply, “You can go back.”

“What?” She asked and something almost pitying came over his features also hesitant, as if he was unsure of how to say what he wanted.

“Death is different for them, for humans, than it is for us. When humans pass through here they have no awareness but we stay and linger and have the ability to wonder where we are and how we got here… What is your name?”

“Lee, Eru Lee.” She said, stiffly, remembering all at once that her name had once not been Eru Lee, that it had been Eleanor Lily Potter until Minato had condensed it into a more manageable form.

(If he was surprised, if he had expected an Elenaor Lily Potter instead, he didn’t show it.)

“Lee, I don’t know how to say this gently or how to say it at all. Only that I once believed that I was human, many years ago, even when I was presented with all evidence to the contrary. Only when it was overwhelming did I allow myself to believe any differently and then I wished that someone had explained it to me as I am now explaining it to you. I believe that you are like me, Eru Lee, that you are the death of this universe.”

There was nothing to say to that, because what could she say to that, to any of this. What could she say to the memories of England, to teleporting to Konoha, to her mastery of ninjutsu and more her mastery over the nidaime’s edo tensei.

Death, she had never thought to call herself Death.

“You will find it easy enough to return to the land of the living; if that’s what you still want.” He said, simply, as if this revelation would be enough for her to…

To abandon Minato, to become essentially a missing nin, to leave everything behind simply because she was… Something that she always had been, from the very beginning, just something she had never had a name for.

She jumped off the root uncertainly, looked out into the vast darkness, the way back to the river somehow clearly lit for her. Stepping forward, hesitantly, she reached out for it but before she did she turned around and met the man’s eyes, gave him a desperate uncertain smile that she didn’t know she possessed.

“Thank you… Father.”

* * *

She found them before they found her.

She was soaked, looking like she’d fallen into a river, her clothing stained with mud and what probably was blood. She looked a little dazed, but seemed more or less intact, more intact than when she had been at the inn even.

Before she could even say anything or he could even think Minato was rushing forward and pulling her into a tight hug. She didn’t respond at first, just sort of twitched, and then hesitantly she pressed her arms to his back and loosely held him.

“Why did you leave like that?” He asked, because he knew her better than that, than believing what she’d said earlier like she hadn’t known what was about to happen.

“I didn’t think plant zombies had friends.” She said, but it was distant, distracted, she kept looking forward and past him as if she barely realized where she was and what had happened.

He let her go and looked her in the face, at her perfectly serious expression, and he wanted to punch her.

“Well, it did have friends.” Jiraiya sensei said and the tone of his words almost seemed like the physical blow Minato wanted to give, “And you ran off into the wilderness alone leaving me and the nidaime too distracted to keep you alive.”

She didn’t say anything at first, just looked over at Jiraiya, and solemnly said, “I know.”

“No, I don’t think you do, you are goddamn lucky you are alive right now. Because I can tell you that techniques mean nothing if you don’t know how to use them, and the fact is that you don’t, you don’t have that combat experience and thinking that you do is like signing your own death sentence. You should be dead right now, Lee-chan!”

The look in her eyes, that solemn look, the kind she so rarely wore only deepened and she repeated, “I know, Jiraiya-sensei.”

Then she put her hands in her pockets, stared back where she had come from, and said quietly, “I already was.”

Before any of them could say anything though she was grinning, a bright cheerful and entirely false thing, and said, “I think we’ve all learned an important lesson today about teamwork. Running away from your team isn’t good for your team spirit; and will probably lead to your death.”

Something in Jiraiya seemed to soften at that, his anger still there, but less potent than before, “…That’s actually one of your better ones, Lee-chan. Keep it in mind next time, even if there are plant zombies around.”

Her grin faltered, became somewhat uncertain, but still remained on her face as Jiraiya reached forward and ruffled her hair, “For the record, kid, I am glad that you’re alive.”

“I am too.” She said, as if she meant this, as if there had been a choice between her living and dying and she felt like she had chosen the right one.

Their sensei looked towards the still dark sky, then to the nidaime, “I hate to say it but we might want to get started. It’d be a bad idea to stay in one place long enough for them to come back.”

The nidaime nodded, distracted and worn looking, “We can impose on my grandniece when we find her.”

They started moving again then, at the same pace as they had before, Haru looking on the verge of passing out from both the running that morning and the fight that night.

“By the way, speaking of your family, since we were attacked by plant zombies has your brother…”

“No.” The nidaime cut him off before Jiraiya could even finish the sentence.

“Well, we might want to check when we get back because I like the idea of other people making plant zombies even less.” Jiraiya said, more under his breath than anything else, but given that he was travelling with shinobi it was clear that everyone would hear it.

“My brother is not making plant zombies.”

And that seemed to be more or less the end of that.

Only, it wasn’t for Minato, there was still so much left unsaid both for him and Lee. Staring at her, at the way her hair trailed behind her as they ran, he felt he had no words to say it with only that feeling of fear and desperate longing.

Like she had already somehow slipped through his fingertips.


	7. The Senju Family Drama

_In which team seven, plus retired hokage, finally manage to find Tsunade, Jiraiya brings Tsunade sort of up to speed with current events but mainly ends up talking about plant zombies, and Lee and Minato talk about what it means to be a god of death._

* * *

 “Holy shit.”

Tsunade would consider her a well-versed alcoholic and since Dan’s death she could argue that there were few who could outmatch her when it came to levels of intoxication. Drowning the bitter grief over Nawaki, Dan, and even Konoha itself was easier than wallowing in it. Even if it did mean that Shizune, who by all rights was still young enough that Tsunade should be looking after her and not the other way around, had to enter bars at three in the morning and drag Tsunade away from the gambling and the sake.

The point was that Tsunade was very familiar with being drunk but somehow hadn’t realized when she’d crossed the line from tipsy into hallucinating black out terrifying drunk, a stage she couldn’t remember ever having been in before.

It was also a stage Shizune usually didn’t let her reach, in fact it was about time for Dan’s niece to make an appearance and drag Tsunade’s ass back to the inn room, and the fact that this was happening meant the girl was late and Tsunade should probably be concerned.

The fact was though that she really couldn’t think of any other reasonable explanation of why a sweaty, frazzled, looking Jiraiya, three grimy and one blood soaked ninja brats, and her supposed to be very dead sweaty, frazzled, and just generally irritable granduncle Tobirama were standing in the entryway to the inn’s bar looking like they’d just passed through Ame during the war.

Jiraiya, the pervert sage, the dead nidaime hokage, and three genin all walk into a bar…

It was like the beginning to the worst joke she’d ever heard (one that Dan probably would have liked…)

So when she caught sight of them she just stared, open mouthed, for far longer than a ninja of her caliber had any right to.

And if it had been any other situation, if it wasn’t three in the morning, she wasn’t already well on her way to drunk, and confronted with her very dead and young looking granduncle the second hokage she probably would have taken one glance at Jiraiya and climbed out the window.

Because in any other situation she would know that Jiraiya’s reappearance in her life could only mean one thing.

But Jiraiya caught sight of her, something like relief appearing in his dark eyes, and then he was booking his way over to her and it was already too late. Before she could say anything he took her bottle of sake and poured himself a shot and drank it down whole, “Tsunade, thank God, you wouldn’t believe the kind of day we’ve had.”

“Is now the time to be drinking?” And god, the man sounded just like granduncle Tobirama had, terse and continually irritated with everything around him (and he’d died before he’d really gotten to know Tsunade’s genin team but she couldn’t help but think that he would have despised Jiraiya and would have glared at him just the way this man was now glaring at the back of Jiraiya’s head.)

Jiraiya ignored the nidaime and continued rambling at her while she just watched in silence, “Actually, you might believe the kind of day we’ve had, because I forgot to complement you on your bountiful breasts and stunning good looks. Which, when have I ever forgotten to do that, eh princess? We’re going to need you to take first watch and also…”

Behind Jiraiya one of the brats, the dark haired one, fell flat on his face and started twitching on the floor looking as if he’d just succumb to physical exhaustion.

“If you could take a look at the kids and try to get them into working order it would be greatly appreciated.”

Before she could say yes, no, or tell Jiraiya to go to hell because she wasn’t a ninja anymore her supposed to be dead granduncle stepped forward and slapped her across the face, the kind that stung and you never quite saw coming, “Afterwards you and I are going to have a very long talk.”

And although Tsunade didn’t know it at the time this was going to be the rest of her life.

* * *

In spite of Jiraiya’s words, he and Tsunade ended up taking that first watch.

The truth was that he and Tobirama probably could have pulled through if they’d had to, splitting watch between them, but at the same time if their leafy friends made a reappearance then Jiraiya didn’t know if he was in any condition to fend them off, alert the nidaime, and rally the kids.

There had been a chance Tsunade would bolt if they’d approached her and then stayed the night but by the time they’d reached the village Jiraiya had been exhausted enough to put his faith in her.

She wouldn’t run away from a fight this close, the village maybe, but not a fight where her teammate’s neck was on the line right in front of her.

But instead of Tsunade alone on the roof of the inn it was the two of them, each staring off in a different direction, while he was taking the time to fill her in on everything that happened since she’d left and they’d arrived on her doorstep.

(All while Tobirama got to babysit, since it didn’t seem he was ready to have a civil conversation with his grandniece, and Jiraiya wasn’t in the mood to, in Lee’s words, ‘good cop bad cop’ her into coming back to Konoha.

Hopefully with sleep he’d be a bit more reasonable.

But it was highly unlikely.)

“I don’t know where to start.” Jiraiya began, practically feeling Tsunade bristling at his back, like he was an idiot for not having his thoughts in perfect order after having spent the night running through the woods with plant zombies on his ass.

On second thought, that was a good way to start, “We’re on the lookout for zombie plants.”

“For what?”

“Plant zombies, it’s Lee-chan’s term. They’re made of this weird white plant substance and look kind of like people but… You’ll know them when you see them.” And he really wished he had a better word for them but Lee’s terms always had a habit of sticking and the plant zombies were no exception.

“And you have to see them, because you can’t sense them by chakra, at least we couldn’t and you know how your granduncle is with sensing.” Not that Jiraiya had really tried, he’d need to go into sage mode for that, but he was guessing if the nidaime was having trouble picking up their zombie friends on his radar then Jiraiya wasn’t going to have much luck either. It was what had screwed them over in the camp, that assumption that they would see anything coming.

“Which is why we’re sitting here like idiots staring off in three different directions.” Tsunade finished for him, quick on the uptake as usual.

“They can also use mokuton, so heads up for that.” Jiraiya added again before clarifying, “A really shitty version of mokuton but they also make up for that by regenerating. So you have to try blowing them up all at once if you want to get rid of them.”

For a moment Tsunade was silent, taking this all in, and then asked, “Anything else?”

“About the plant ninja, not really… Oro seems to be doing well enough in his state of the art laboratory, I think he’s happy, he certainly looks like he’s having fun.” That was an understatement, since Lee’s invention of her clone technique, he’d had test subjects galore for all of his increasingly nasty poisons, offensive fuinjutsu, and genetic experiments. He’d probably never been happier in that respect.

“Weren’t you going to fill me in on why my granduncle’s with the living?” Tsunade asked, and wasn’t it weird how Jiraiya had almost forgotten that there were people who didn’t know that Tobirama and Hashirama were back from the dead? Like it was his new normal or something.

Maybe being Lee’s sensei had just desensitized him, the way it had long since desensitized Minato, stuff like that just didn’t get to him anymore. That was actually mildly terrifying, now that he thought about it.

“S-rank secret, I’m afraid. Sensei isn’t pulling punches with this one.” Jiraiya said with a shrug, and she’d know well enough not to argue, and that she’d only find out the real reason once she was inside the hokage tower meeting with sensei.

(Of course, it was really an S-ranked secret of an S-ranked secret, the first being that Orochimaru had resurrected them using edo tensei and if you made it past that you got to learn that really it was Eru Lee doing whatever Eru Lee did for ramen.

But he just wasn’t even going to go there considering now wasn’t the time or the place to fill Tsunade in on the madness that was his genin kunoichi.)

And there was his bait, his real bait, that her family was popping up like daisies and there was some secret technique that maybe could bring Dan or Nawaki back. And knowing Tsunade, no matter how far she wanted to run from Konoha she couldn’t turn her back on a chance like that.

And he wondered if Lee would do it, bring Nawaki and Dan back, if Tsunade asked her. She’d done it before but she’d only done it once before and so far no one had approached her (in part because they thought it was Orochimaru who had done all the work if they had any explanation at all beyond S-rank secret).

Lee was sometimes painfully casual and oblivious to the implications of her actions, actually that was most of the time, but she wasn’t stupid and for all her unawareness there were times when she seemed to know exactly where her actions would take her.

He could see her saying yes but he could also quite clearly see her saying no.

Because that was a slippery slope they’d all avoided embarking on so far.

Which just got him thinking back to his most problematic tadpole, “Hey, Tsunade, when you were checking out the kids did you notice anything off about Lee-chan?”

“Which one was that?”

“The red-headed girl, looks kind of like an Uzumaki.” Although really at the hair color the similarities between Lee and Kushina or Mito ended, if anything Lee looked more like a bastard Uchiha than she did an Uzumaki.

“Her name is Lee? What kind of a parent names their daughter Lee?”

Jiraiya had often wondered the same thing but had never really gotten around to asking Lee that. She probably didn’t know herself, being an orphan, and having grown up in the orphanage himself Jiraiya knew there were questions you just didn’t ask.

“She’s an orphan, but anyway, did you notice anything… Health wise, I mean.”

“No, she was probably the best off of the three of them. Why, did you expect something?”

Frankly, yes, he had expected quite a big something and not finding it was making him… uneasy.

One thing Jiraiya had noticed was that their plant assailants didn’t bleed, or at least their blood wasn’t red, instead it was a strange yellow white pus that was so beyond gross that Jiraiya had had a hard time looking at the stuff afterwards.

Lee, after her little dip in the river, had been covered in blood. Enough blood that it hadn’t washed out when she’d fallen in and was noticeable even on the dark blue fabric of her shirt. But when she’d stumbled up to them there’d been no wound, no sign of anything bleeding, aside from being a bit dazed she’d been perfectly fine.

Just covered in enough blood that it looked like she’d suffered either a nasty blow to the head or a fatal wound to the chest.

But then he wasn’t a medic nin so maybe his instincts weren’t the best for this sort of thing.

“No, I guess not.” He said with a sigh, letting it go and putting a mental note on the issue to bring it up once everyone was back in Konoha, if Lee was fine she was fine and that’s all she needed to be for the mission.

Later he could ask her what the hell had happened when she’d decided to wander off and play ninja hero in the woods.

“Just so you know, Jiraiya, even though I’m helping you keep watch there’s no way in hell that I’m going back to Konoha in the morning.”

And later he could think about how to convince her without having to watch the nidaime and her duke it out first. At the moment he was just thinking about how Tsunade was sounding a bit too confident, putting it out there like that, and that undercurrent of temptation and desperate need was hiding beneath that confident bravado.

Maybe had it been ten years later, or even five, she’d be more set in her ways but as it was this was new territory for all of them and things had already changed more than they could imagine.

It was a new world they were in; they just didn’t know it yet.

“Just letting you know.”

She could let Jiraiya know all she wanted, Jiraiya wasn’t the issue, no she had bigger things to be worrying about.

“Try telling that to the nidaime.”

And as if saying his title was enough from below in the inn they could almost both feel that spike in killing intent as Senju Tobirama continued to let his anger fester.

The morning was probably going to be more interesting than anyone had intended.

* * *

“Minato.”

It was the kind of sleep that felt like a lead weight on your eyelids, where you had to claw your way out of it, like you were crawling out of a deep well towards a distant pinprick of light and your dreams still clung to you like shadows.

Only, he couldn’t tell what he was dreaming, there were too many loose and shifting images, and it had that sort of dream logic where you knew everything you needed to and couldn’t recognize where the holes were.

Like the idea of himself, an older version of himself, telling a black cloaked someone (only not a someone but a something), that something wasn’t good enough. In the depths of the dream he knew exactly what he was talking about but as he climbed towards awareness that drifted away until all that was left was this confusing idea of a fox until that too slipped from him.

“Minato.”

Slowly, painfully, his eyes opened and he blinked until Lee came into focus.

She was inches from him, under the covers of his bed, close enough that he could make out blue freckles in her eyes which he’d always thought were almost wholly green. Her hair, now unbraided, was spread out around her head like a halo, some of the red curls brushing his fingertips.

“Lee?” He asked, and in the question was the other of what was she doing in his bed, when she had one of her own in the room.

She didn’t answer that though, or say anything, instead she kept staring an expression her face that she rarely wore. It was probably one of the most natural ones she had, where nothing was painted or plastered on for the sake of others, instead it was bare, intense, and frighteningly serious.

As the silence went on he felt himself slipping back into sleep, taking those eyes with him, returning to the strange half-remembered world of demon foxes and fuinjutsu.

Before he could though, “Minato.”

“Hm? Lee, what is it?” With great effort he opened his eyes again and willed himself to be awake, at least long enough to tell Lee that if it wasn’t important enough to say then it was more important that they all got some sleep before heading back.

“If I wasn’t what we thought I was, if I was something else instead, would you mind?”

Minato opened his eyes further, trying to process the question, but not quite managing because he didn’t know what they had thought she was. Minato had never really thought about it, Lee was just Lee, what other answer could there be?

“I don’t know if I thought you were anything… So, no, I guess I wouldn’t mind.” And he paused, hesitated over his next question of, are you alright? Because she wasn’t, he knew it, and so there was no point in asking something they both already knew the answer to.

What he really wanted to know was would she be okay, but he didn’t know how to ask that, or if she would even have an answer.

“I met my father.” She said, simply, and to someone else this might be a perfectly reasonable sentence.

But Minato had known before anyone else that Lee’s parents were very dead, or she had always thought they were. And if they weren’t dead then they would have been in England, where Lee was from, and not in the middle of the Land of Fire.

“I also found out why ninjutsu’s so easy for me, how I could complete the edo tensei, or why I have so much chakra.” She paused then, leaning closer, a hand reaching out to grip him so that he couldn’t move or look away, “My father, Minato, isn’t James Potter, it’s the Shinigami.”

And she left it for Minato to put it together, not only that Lee wasn’t human, was a demigod, but that Lee had met with the Shinigami. Lee had met with the Shinigami when no one was looking and had walked away from it.

Lee had said earlier that she had already died.

“He said he’s the Shinigami of a different dimension, some other world, and that I’m the Shinigami of this one.” Which would explain why she had been able to revive the first two hokages but raised a thousand more questions with it.

“Wait you… died and he said that he was your father?” All the while trying to picture what the Shinigami looked like, because the legends had never been clear, and they really were just legends. You didn’t summon gods into the world these days, not since the era of the Sage of the Six Paths, had gods walked so casually among mortals.

She shook her head, “He has my eyes, and we share a lot of the same face, and he was waiting for me when I died and said I could come back here if I needed to… He also… He seemed like what a father would be like.”

For a moment they just stared at each other, each trying to come to terms with the fact that not only had Lee died and returned from the dead, but that she was also apparently the god of death, and that there was some other god of death who loitered in the pure world that looked enough like Lee to pass for her father.

And there was that fear again, momentarily, of her slipping away because Lee had died and he hadn’t even been there to see it. Lee had died and was apparently a god and had come back and he wouldn’t have known if she wasn’t telling him.

“Minato?” She asked, and he looked up and caught a flicker in her expression, something uncertain and afraid that was reflected on his own face.

She was just as frightened as he was.

“I’m, I’m okay, it’s just a lot to take in… Do you feel any different?”

“Not really.” She said with a shrug, “Besides, I’ve always been the Shinigami, we just didn’t know it.”

He hadn’t thought of that, that this wasn’t Lee changing into anything knew, it was just a different word for what to call her, “Oh, right. Shouldn’t you have known something like that, wouldn’t somebody else have known?”

She shrugged again, almost casually, and offhandedly remarked, “The Dursleys and I never really got into the origins of Eru Lee beyond car crash and drunkard parents.  So I don’t know how I would have known.”

That wasn’t quite what he meant. He had thought that being something like the Shinigami wasn’t something you were told but something you just knew. Lee didn’t seem to think of it quite like that, but then, maybe she was right. If there was only one Uchiha left, whose parents had died when he was born, and nobody had ever seen someone with a sharingan before then he might not know he had it.

Not until it activated.

So he didn’t know if she should have known, if he should have known, or if somebody should have known.

Only it still felt like something you couldn’t simply find out.

“Are you okay with that, I mean everything?”

For a moment she paused, considering the question, and then nodded, “I never felt all that human anyway.”

And he’d never known that either, that the difference between Lee and everyone else was great enough that she’d felt an instinctive divide, she’d never told him before.

“Do you think I should tell Jiraiya?”

He hadn’t realized she wasn’t going to, or that she hadn’t already, but then Lee always did come to him first (and was it bad that this was relieving)?

“Well, it’s kind of important, so you probably should.” Minato said, because it felt like one of those large things that the hokage should probably know about, and probably should have known about a long time ago.

“I don’t really like dying all that much though, it was fairly painful, and I just have this nagging suspicion that Orochimaru would get to hack up my corpse on a daily basis.”

That wasn’t wrong, as much as Minato wanted to protest it, because as it was he questioned Orochimaru’s methods and he’d never tried to kill the real Lee before, just her clones. And if he was guaranteed that Lee could come back from the dead (something Lee herself hadn’t even guaranteed) then there would be nothing to stop him.

“Right, maybe they don’t have to know.” Or, more accurately, maybe Orochimaru didn’t have to know.

“Well, I don’t want to lie about it either.” Lee said, her brow furrowing, and her solemn look being replaced by one of uncertainty. And that was true because he didn’t want to lie to Jiraiya or the hokage either  for

“No, no, I mean, don’t lie about it just… don’t bring it up.”

“But what if it comes up? What if I not-die again after being stabbed?”

“Then I guess you tell everyone.” Minato said before adding, “But that doesn’t mean you have to tell everyone now.”

“Right, after all, it’s not like anything’s different, not like anything’s changed.” Lee said and then continued in a more confident tone, “So there’s no reason that everything shouldn’t stay exactly the same.”

And they just stared at each other, neither of them really believing those words, but neither of them willing to say anything against them either. Just lying there, facing each other in the dark, and thinking about how already things were very different than they had been before.

“On the upside this means that the plant zombie assassins are completely wasting their time and I can stop worrying about being skewered by flowers.”

* * *

“I’ll bet you five ryo that Tsunade-shishou and I aren’t coming with you.”

It was morning, the sun was shining, the grass was green, the plant zombies appeared to have retreated from whence they came, and Tobirama, Jiraiya, and Tsunade were in a Mexican Standoff.

Of course, that wasn’t the word shinobi used for the situation, Lee wasn’t quite sure of the exact term for it but she knew that there was one. Some perfect phrase to describe three shinobi, eyes flickering towards each other, each waiting for the other to start speeding through hand seals.

And off to the side Lee, Minato, Dead Last, and Tsunade’s apprentice were all watching the confrontation that was about to take place in the middle of the road.

It had almost taken place in the inn, except Tsunade had tried to escape near sunrise by grabbing her respective child and making a run for it, but it seemed like Jiraiya and the nidaime had been ready for this because she’d barely made it out of the village when they’d caught up with her.

“Tsunade, I think it’s time for us to be reasonable.” Jiraiya started, his eyes flickering towards the nidaime who did not look like he was about to be reasonable, and Tsunade who also didn’t look like she was going to be reasonable.

“Reasonable? Jiraiya, don’t be an idiot. I’m long past the point of being reasonable!”

Meanwhile, on the side of the road, Haru stared at the girl with wide eyes, “Is this really something you should be betting on? This is serious, this is about bringing the sannin back together.”

Which made it sound like they were bringing the band back together which probably wasn’t the idea Haru had been going for. Lee still was a little fuzzy on the whole ‘legendary three’ concept when it really turned out it was the legendary two. She still felt that Jiraiya and Orochimaru should petition for it to be the dynamic duo instead.

And with that thought it really was like everything was normal, like nothing at all had changed, and like Lee was still the same old Lee she’d always been. No one here knew that she’d gone from vaguely impersonating Jesus to really impersonating Jesus.

It was a little alarming.

There they were, listening to Jiraiya screaming back to Tsunade about being self-pitying and Tsunade screaming back about being a useless and cursed shinobi, and the nidaime screaming back that she was acting worse than the goddamn melodramatic Uchihas and that it didn’t matter if she was useless and everyone was dead because you still couldn’t abandon the village.

(It really was starting to look less like a Mexican standoff and more like an episode of the Jerry Springer show, all they needed were the chairs to throw at each other’s heads while they screamed about familial problems and they could be on daytime television.)

She decided to think about bets and Tsuande instead, “I have no interest in such materialistic things. Make a better offer.”

The girl’s eyebrows raised, as if she hadn’t really expected any of them to take her up on her bet, “What do you want?”

Well, she already had ramen from Orochimaru, there wasn’t much else worth asking for now that she thought about it. She turned to look to Minato, wordlessly requesting his opinion.

“What do you have to offer?” Minato asked and what little hope Haru appeared to possess flickered away and he got that slightly terrified resigned look that he always had when Lee and Minato were putting a plan into action.  

“I don’t really know… I could teach you about poisons, I suppose.”

“That sounds mildly useful.” Lee commented, her eyes flickering to Minato’s, and judging by his expression he thought it was a good deal as well.

“We accept.” Minato summarized, “Is there anything you’d like from us, if we lose?”

“Well, if you lose I don’t know if I’ll see you again.” The girl pointed out, which was probably true, if Tsunade had her way which Lee very much doubted would happen.

Plus, now she was invested, deadly poisons were on the line and Lee and Minato couldn’t let an opportunity like that go to waste. Lee might be inexplicably and or vaguely explicably immortal but Minato, as far as she knew, was very human and if he died then that was it.

Of course, she could always bring him back, the way she’d brought back Tobirama and Hashirama but she didn’t want to think like that. There was something about the idea of bringing people back so casually, bringing anyone and everyone back, that made her hesitate.

She would, without question, but she’d rather it not come to that.

(In the standoff the nidaime began to gather chakra and every nearby puddle began to shudder slightly and Tsunade herself also began gathering her chakra, bringing a thumb to her lips and biting it, preparing to summon giant slugs and at the sight of her doing this Jiraiya did the same only to summon giant frogs instead.

If they had any luck it would turn into Godzilla versus Mothera in the middle of the street.)

“If you could have anything what would it be?” Minato asked, keeping a wary eye on the three adults in the middle of the road.

“A pig.” The girl said after some consideration, looking mildly embarrassed, but saying it with confidence.

“A pig?”

“I’ve always wanted a pet pig.”

Lee could do a pig, she gave Minato a subtle nod, not that she would need to because it was in their best interest to win this little bet. And with that Lee stood, dusting off her clothes, and ignoring the battle that was just beginning to unfold.

“Where are you going to get a pig?” Haru asked, his eyes narrowing, probably knowing very well where she and Minato were going to get a pig.

“Are you questioning our methods, Dead Last? For shame, we’re supposed to be a united front on missions.” Jiraiya had been very explicit about team work during their training as well as their mission’s briefing.

“Don’t give me that, you know what I’m talking about!” Dead Last exclaimed, actually looking mildly angry, before asking, “And what are you doing?”

“Winning us our bet.”

“Can’t you leave that to sensei? He was her teammate, remember, and the nidaime her granduncle.”

Lee spared Jiraiya and Tobirama a glance, “They’re taking too long. And anyways, I’m kind of getting tired of this whole C-rank thing.”

It had been fun while it lasted, and it wasn’t lethal, but it was more than past time to head back to Konoha and get back to regular training instead.

And more, she needed time and space to think, to think about the man she’d met in the pure world, and the color of his eyes.

Learning how to poison people was just an added bonus.

* * *

In retrospect it quickly spiraled out of control but then Tobirama had been nursing this wound ever since he had been revived and by the time they finally reached his grandniece it was much too late to stop it.

He remembered her as a little girl, Hashirama had always been closer to her, they had shared a love of gambling (and losing each and every one of their bets) but she and Nawaki had been the closest things to grandchildren that he’d had.

Grief was a terrible thing, he understood that, he had lost all but one of his brothers to war with the Uchiha. He understood the rage and the helplessness, trapped in an endless war, staring over Itama’s grave and thinking how he had been the youngest of all of them so why was he dead? He understood why Tsunade had turned herself into this hollow frightened shell of a human being.

But she did not understand him and his brother and that was what he couldn’t forgive.

She didn’t know, couldn’t seem to comprehend, what Konoha had done for her. That it had ended the clan wars, where clan heads would have five or more sons if only because they were almost guaranteed that four of them would not see their tenth birthday, that she and her brother weren’t pushed ahead in the ranks before their time, that they were trained and could rely on other clans to support them, rely on the Uchiha even to support them.

It was not world peace but Tobirama had never truly believed in world peace, that was Hashirama’s dream, what he did believe in was dedication and loyalty to that dream.

And she called hokage a fool’s dream, not even thinking that it had been her grandfather’s original foolish dream first, and that everything she knew and believed in had been built off of that fool’s dream.

It’d quickly turned into a rather brutal spar.

He’d been so angry at that point he’d stopped paying attention to exactly what she was saying, catching only that there was no point in her returning, that she didn’t want to return, and that even the revival of her own grandfather and granduncle weren’t enough to convince her.

He only clearly remembered that at one point he had said that her story was not so different from Uchiha Madara’s, who had left believing Konoha to be a failure, and had returned with the Kyuubi to destroy them all. The same man who had been responsible for the death of her grandfather and the Mito’s status as the jinchuuriki.

The only difference was that she had scurried and hid while Madara had enough conviction to confront them.

And then, before Tsunade could throw another overpowered punch or Jiraiya could summon another oversized toad, Tobirama found himself unable to move, as if he had been caught by a Nara. Staring ahead he could see Tsunade caught as well, paused in an awkward position with one arm forward and one leg back.

“Alright, so, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from all those academy lectures I didn’t pay attention to it was that we should all talk through our problems as a team and that violence is never the answer… Unless you’re killing enemy ninja, then violence is always the answer.”

Eru Lee stepped in between them all with a cheery grin on her face, the kind that only belonged on small sheltered civilian children, or his demented older brother. Now that he thought about it many of Eru’s mannerisms reminded him of Hashirama. Thankfully his brother had been spending most of his time with Mito and not corrupting Eru Lee any further; he’d have to make sure it stayed that way.

“Since all of this seems to be revolving around Tsunade we’ll start with you. Why don’t you want to come back to the village, Tsunade-sama?” Lee turned to Tsunade expectantly, as if they were all fully capable of having a civil conversation at the moment.

“Why don’t I… Didn’t you hear anything I’ve been saying?!” And he could tell, even though she wasn’t saying it, that Tsunade was beyond disturbed that this genin had managed to paralyze three of the best ninja Konoha had ever seen without any visible effort.

One day, he couldn’t help but think, that girl would become a terrifying shinobi and perhaps could even take the title of God of Shinobi for herself.

She didn’t seem to realize this though, or was so used to her own potential that she marked it as unimportant, and instead remained hopelessly casual and overpowered.

“Well, to be honest I wasn’t really listening, and you weren’t being very clear. Try five sentences or less.” Lee said, and for a moment Tsunade just stared at her like she was the biggest idiot she’d ever seen, and then through gritted teeth Tsunade summarized what she’d spent the last ten minutes ranting about.  

“I am useless as a medic-nin if I can’t stand the sight of blood. My brother is dead, Dan is dead and I am the one responsible. I gave them my grandfather’s necklace and both of them died the next day, I am cursed! Do you need any other reason?”

For a moment Lee said nothing, rocked back and forth on her heels, surveying Tsunade and said, “Well, considering we were paid to come get you they must want you, even if you can’t be a medic-nin anymore. Plus, if you don’t come back Jiraiya and Orochimaru are going to have to change their name from sannin to something much less impressive sounding.”

“Are you serious?”

“Very serious, sannin just sounds very impressive, and it’d be hard to go from that to anything else.” Lee said and then concluded, “So for that reason alone you have to come back.”

“I think they’ll live.” Tsunade said before sighing, her rage dripping from her and leaving something hollow in its place, “Besides, it’s not that easy.”

Tobirama felt the anger slipping from him too then, because they had already won, and staying angry and bitter would solve nothing and seemed pointless in the face of this broken young woman.

She would come back and it would have to be enough.

He and Hashirama would help her see that it was more than enough.

“I don’t see why it’s not that easy, it is C-ranked after all.” Lee said, blinking in actual confusion, before adding, “Besides, you aren’t the only Senju anymore, and if you don’t come back then Tobirama is probably going to drag your ass back and none of us want that.”

“It doesn’t change the fact that I’m cursed.”

“No, I suppose it doesn’t…” Lee trailed off, looking at Hashirama’s necklace, one that Tobirama had marked earlier but put no real thought into, “I hear you like to gamble.”

“So?”

“So, how about I bet that if you give me that necklace I won’t die tomorrow and you have to come back to Konoha?” And there it was, that grin she sometimes wore, as if Lee knew that she had already won.

“What? Are you insane?” Tsunade couldn’t look down at the necklace, still trapped by Lee’s jutsu, but her eyes grew wide, “I just said everyone who has ever worn it besides me has died! And you want to go trying it on?”

“Too late! Bet made!” Lee darted forward, plucking the necklace from Tsuande and beaming, “Now you have to come back with us to Konoha! If only to make sure I don’t unfortunately die in some horrible training accident.”

Then, before any of them had any time to stop it, the world lurched and the grown fell away and somehow the girl had used her teleportation jutsu to bring them all to Konoha’s gates and the stunned chunin guard.

“Eru Lee, genin number 23605, reporting in from C-ranked mission with team seven, retired hokage, and the crazy necklace lady!”


	8. Lee's Guide on Becoming God

_In which all Lee wants to do is be left alone so that she can die properly, the Shinigami tries and fails to deal with the question of his paternity, and Tsunade’s life gets ten times weirder._

* * *

Somehow they ended up in the Forest of Death, carcasses of giant blood sucking leeches curled in great smoking craters, several trees on fire (some melted) and a few surviving nightmarish creatures pitifully dragging their useless limbs while shrieking like mortally wounded goats.

Uzumaki Kushina, Uchiha Mikoto, Nara Shikaku, Yamanaka Inoichi, Akimichi Chozu, Hatake Sakumo, Orochimaru, Jiraiya, and Namikaze Minato all stared at Eru Lee in complete and utter silence.

Lee, for her own part, simply stared back. Then, in her calmest and most authoritative voice, “…There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this.”

* * *

“Oh, Tsunade, look at you, you’re all grown up!” Tsunade’s grandfather was back from the dead, looking as alive and young as ever (god, he looked like he was her age, he’d seemed so old when she was young), sobbing and squeezing the life out of her in sensei’s office, “And I missed all of it! You’re all grown up and I only have memories of you as an adorable little girl with a gambling problem almost as large as mine!”

“Larger than yours.” And there was her also ridiculously young granduncle, glaring at his brother, looking completely exasperated the thought, ‘this is the shit I put up with’, practically plastered on his face.

Tsunade was inside of the Hokage’s office, having been teleported from backwater edge of the Land of Fire by a twelve-year-old girl to the gates of Konoha, then shuffled into her sensei’s office, and now being squeezed to death by her overemotional wreck of a grandfather.

“Larger than mine!” Hashirama wailed, squeezing her harder, large crocodile tears dribbling down his face and staining her clothes, “I’ve missed everything! I’m so sorry, Tsunade-chan!”

“Stop it, you could hardly help being dead.” Tobirama spat out pinching the bridge of his nose and grumbling, “Although you could have helped that damned friendship with Madara.”

Hashirama either didn’t hear or was pretending not to because suddenly he was drawing back from her and grinning through his tears, “Oh, but Tsunade, you look great! Everything’s changed you know, well, maybe not to you but to me… There’s this whole academy curriculum, you know, now that I’m retired I was thinking I might teach there...”

“I’m afraid, Hashirama, that someone of your talents could be used somewhere other than the academy.” Sensei cut in, with a fond and somewhat exasperated smile, causing Hashirama to flush and wave his hand, all of the sorrow disappearing in an instant.

“Right, right, I forgot for a moment that I wasn’t really old just… temporarily retired. Being retired is kind of nice though, Mito and I started a garden! Oh and I help her apprentice, the adorable Kushina, learn sealing and all sorts of cool techniques and let’s see...” He kept talking but at that point Tsunade stopped listening, she just started zoning out, and it struck her that this was it.

She’d had a spiked drink. She’d had some sort of spiked drink in that bar and she was really still out in the boonies somewhere drowning in her own vomit. Shizune would counteract the poison soon and she’d wake up and all of this would be some sort of ridiculous dream.

And she just nodded, because it looked like he wanted some kind of a reaction but… But she didn’t know what to say, because they were acting like this was all normal and…

“I think I need to sit down.” Tsunade said and turned to look for a chair, which of course was on the far side of the room, she walked over to it in a daze and dragged it back over so that it was right across from sensei’s crystal ball and sat down.

“Feeling better, Tsunade?” Her sensei, the current hokage, asked and somehow in it was concern, awkwardness, understanding, humor, and… Everything complicated that this situation held.

Because she’d expected something… Well, something else if she ever came back. She expected having to own up to her actions, to beg forgiveness, or to make him beg forgiveness for having this village where good people like Dan and children like Nawaki were sent out to die. She didn’t know what she expected, she just expected it to be hard, draining, but instead it was just…

“I’m… adequate.” Not okay, not right now, maybe not ever again but, “I just… I’ve seen Uncle Tobi and now… grandpa… And Jiraiya said, well he didn’t say anything, but he did say that if I came back to Konoha then I could find out what the hell is going on!”

She took a deep breath and added before he could answer, “I’m not promising to stay, I don’t care what you say, or the fact that I’m here already. I can’t work as a medic-nin, especially not in the field and I… My being in this office now isn’t promising anything!”

She hoped, to be honest, it was getting harder to hold onto that conviction. It’d been hard, even the past year or so, because as much as she denied it she still had ties to this place. Sure, sensei, Jiraiya, and Orochimaru were big men and would be fine without her and she had been so insistent that she would be better off without the village and the village without her but… But there was Tobirama, alive, and that smiling cheerful girl taking the cursed necklace from her without a thought in the world.

And suddenly she just didn’t know anymore.

(And judging by sensei’s expression he knew that too, his eyes, how could they be so hard and so soft in the same moment?)

Behind her she felt a rather familiar spike of killing intent, one that had been very present the previous night as well as only a few hours before.

“You’re not promising to stay?” It was the tone of voice that would have had any sane man running for the hills, “You leave your village, force them to drag you back, and you’re not promising to stay?”

She turned her head to look at Tobirama and it struck her that he was the same age she was, or he looked around it, and that if this really was Tobirama Senju then this was the nidaime hokage in his prime.

This was someone who was stronger than Hanzo in Ame had been.

“Tobi,” Hashirama put a hand on his brother’s shoulder, his expression suddenly quite serious, “If you can’t stay calm you’re going to have go.”

“I’m perfectly calm, Hashirama.” And he was, the nidaime’s anger had always been something cold, sharp, and perfectly calm.

“Tobi, go visit Mito, teach her apprentice a few tricks in sealing, come back later.”

“I am fine Hashirama, I am perfectly capable of…”

“Tobi, come back later.”

For a moment it seemed as if Tobirama wouldn’t listen, like he and Tsunade would be going for round two in the hokage tower, but with a glance towards the hokage and then towards his brother Tobirama gave them all a disdainful look and then slammed the door on his way out.

“Right, well, as you no doubt remember sometimes Tobi can get a little angry. Don’t take it personally, Tsunade-chan, he doesn’t really mean it he’s just…” Hashirama’s hands flailed, searching for some word that didn’t describe what Tobirama thought, what Hashirama himself probably felt.

That Tsunade was a traitor, a failure, and a disappointment who had disrespected every single one of her ancestors. Such that she was lumped together with Madara, Madara who’d tried to destroy Konoha and had killed her grandfather.

Of all the people she had expected to confront about her choices her granduncle hadn’t been one of them.

“Right, well… I guess I’ll talk to him later.” Tsuande said, although it probably would be a good while later, given what she remembered her uncle’s temper being like.

“Don’t worry about it, he gets upset with me all of the time, and he always seems to forgive me.” Her grandfather said, smiling brightly, patting her reassuringly on the back like he was completely oblivious to the fact that Tobirama had routinely thought of him as a giant idiot.

A well-meaning guy but a giant idiot nonetheless.

She couldn’t handle this, she rubbed at her temples, desperately wishing for a drink, “Right, well, you were going to explain what the hell is happening?”

For a moment the sandaime and shodaime hokage simply exchanged a glance, one that asked where the hell they could start, and then her sensei’s gaze returned to hers with a sigh and he said, “Officially, Orochimaru has perfected the edo tensei and used it to resurrect the first two hokages.”

“…And that’s officially.” Meaning that this wasn’t really what had happened.

Which, well, it was an explanation that was somewhat reasonable. She didn’t know a lot about her granduncle’s forbidden technique but she knew the basics that it did technically raise the dead. So, perhaps with a bit of tweaking, a bit of inventiveness on Orochimaru’s part, then perhaps he could have used it to bring them back. And if he’d bring anyone back from the dead it would be the hokages.

If she was a spy, or hell if she was just her, and she heard that Orochimaru had perfected her grandfather’s technique… Well, she might just believe that.

Her sensei frowned, bit on his pipe and leaned back in his chair to observe her, “What did you think of Jiraiya’s genin team?”

That seemed like a bit of a tangent, she blinked, glanced at Hashirama who was surprisingly unreadable in the moment and shrugged, “I honestly didn’t get much of a chance to talk to them. They seem like… good kids?”

“And the girl, Eru Lee?” Her sensei prompted and suddenly Tsunade remembered that, yes, the girl had made a bit of an impression even amid all the epic showdowns with Jiraiya and Tobirama.

“Is a goddamned A-ranked genin, sensei! She teleports! She doesn’t just teleport she… freezes people, like a Nara, but not like a Nara!” Because Tsunade had checked and none of the kids were anywhere close to her shadow and it hadn’t felt like some ordinary method of paralysis it’d felt… She didn’t know what it felt like!

And he had the gall to laugh at her, a good-natured laugh like she’d just said everything he’d wanted her to say and she should get a gold star. Her grandfather, for his own part, just asked in a bit of a clueless manner, “She paralyzes people now? Is that one new? I feel like Tobi keeps an ongoing list somewhere but I honestly have no idea where it is right now.”

“She also raises the dead.” Sensei finally said, after calming down enough to talk reasonably again.

“You’re telling me a twelve-year-old girl raised my grandfather and granduncle from the dead.” Tsunade said, waiting for sensei to tell her it was all an elaborate hoax, and she was still going to check later (check blood and tissue samples) and make sure it was really them but…

“The girl has an unknown blood limit,” Sensei said tossing a rather thick file her way, opening it revealed several stacks of paper along with a photograph of Eru Lee and then another one of team seven, “As of yet we have no name and no clear understanding of its limits or how it works, Orochimaru has been working on it.”

Tsunade flicked through the file, and it was everything she hadn’t asked before but now wanted to know.

Eru Lee, age twelve, mother unknown, father unknown, date of birth July 31, clan unknown.

“Jiraiya said that she’s an orphan but…”

“According to Eru she’s from a relatively small civilian village in a country called _England_ , it’s a northern island with mild climate, and to our best guess is located somewhere further off the coast than Wave. Somewhere far enough that they’ve developed their own independent language which she and Namikaze speak fluently.”

There even was a note on that in the file, these odd foreign words written out phonetically, and her eyes darted to it while sensei continued talking, “She claims that her entire country was comprised of civilians, that they are unaware of the existence of shinobi, and that her relatives were all civilians.”

Tsunade looked up at him with raised eyebrows, because she’d met that girl, and no one with that much chakra could possibly have two non-shinobi parents. “She says that her parents died when she was very young. But, keep in mind, that we only know what she’s said, nothing has been confirmed.”

“Well, how did she get here then?”  

“Well, the same way you got here, she teleported.” Hashirama answered for her, and she hadn’t thought about that, and it was actually kind of frightening that someone could just teleport into Konoha willy-nilly.

“Arrived on the doorstep of the orphanage, speaking gibberish, and she’s been here ever since.”

Tsunade just kept reading, flipping a page and staring at… A list of techniques, mastered and invented, many of them before she’d even graduated.

Orochimaru was considered a genius, Jiraiya in his own blockheaded way was considered a genius, but nothing those two had ever done at her age compared to what Eru Lee had apparently accomplished in between naps at the academy.

A shinobi like that, even a single shinobi… It changed the whole game.

“I think I need a drink.”

* * *

The beginning of the end, the end being the clearing in the Forest of Death with everyone staring at her and the massive amounts of destruction she had never intended to bring about, started shortly after team seven and others returned successfully from the ‘retrieve ungrateful honorable granddaughter’ mission.

Specifically, it all began to end when they settled the bet with Tsunade’s dark-haired apprentice, Shizune.

The girl was a few years younger than them, her legs dangling from the booth and kicking back and forth, but she seemed level headed enough and more than willing to fulfil her end of the bargain, “I don’t know, Tsunade-shishou hasn’t said we’re staying yet.”

“She would have to fight her way through ANBU and the angry nidaime if she wanted to make it out.” Lee helpfully pointed out, because there was no way in hell that Tsunade was getting out now. So, as far as Lee could see it, the bet had been over as soon as it had been made.

The girl still looked somewhat unconvinced, which might be fair since she probably had minimal experience with fighting through hordes of ANB, and Lee tried to think of a better argument (all while fingering her new stolen necklace) but was swiftly sidetracked before she could get any further.

“Actually…” Unfortunately, Dead Last took that as his cue to interject with something useless.

“What?” Lee asked, turning her glare over to the least useful member of their team, which usually made him flinch but today he seemed to be holding his own.

“Don’t you think we should get some rest before we do things like… learn how to poison people?”

“We slept at the inn.” Lee responded, and they had, sure she and Minato had had a bit of a heart to heart about her being the death of the universe but they’d had plenty of downtime. Not that she felt fantastic but she was definitely with it enough to learn new ways to kill people.

“I’m just saying that maybe it’s not a great idea to start handling really dangerous materials that could probably kill you when you’re sleep deprived.” Apparently, when sleep deprived, Dead Last managed to actually grow a spine. He looked terrible, dark circles under his eyes, thinner than he used to be but he also looked more like a shinobi for it.

“ANBU does it all the time.” From what she’d seen ANBU thought sleep was for the weak or, in their more morbid moments, for the dead.

“They’re also trained to do it!”

Before she could respond that she would be perfectly fine handling lethal toxins even without napping Minato interjected, “Actually, Lee, I think Haru’s right.”

Slowly, almost unwillingly, she turned to face the ultimate voice of reason in any of her daily schemes. Minato looked drained, pale, so very tired and like the only thing keeping him from going back home to the apartment early was ramen and the fact that she was still out here. His clothes still had blood on them, her clothes still had blood on them, and it was clear from his expression that the only thing he wanted to do was go home and get some rest.

Of course, that was why they needed to learn this and learn it soon, because they couldn’t be in that sort of position again. Sure Lee apparently, maybe, couldn’t die and she still had to think about what that even meant but if Minato got a kunai to the chest he wouldn’t be nearly so lucky.

She and Minato were… different.

Of course, they always had been and this had been fine, but suddenly the idea of mortality was very grave and imposing inside of her head.

“Lee, there’s no rush...” Minato said, and in it she could hear what he meant, that there was time that they weren’t rushed by anything, that Lee was just a little edgy since she’d gone to the pure world and back again.

They had time, time to grow, time until the chunin exams…

And Minato probably wasn’t in any mood or condition to start now anyways. He probably wanted to think over what she’d said, what she’d told him, just as much as she did.

With a great frustrated sigh Lee relented, painfully, “Alright, fine, we’ll do this later.”

But of course, what Lee really meant in that moment, was that Minato would be doing this later. As they chattered on at lunch, brought Shizune outside Uzumaki Mito’s house, and then returned with exhausted relief to their own apartments Lee planned to get a head start as she was in perfect condition to do something useful.

So, alone in her shared apartment, Lee had thought about one of the first things you needed with poisoning.

Immunization, if your own poisons could kill you, then you probably weren’t going to get very far in life. So, to start on that, she’d have to poison herself by inches and to get a great head start on that she probably wanted to start on something well and truly nasty.

And, since she appeared to be more or less impervious to dying, there weren’t any real drawbacks if she messed it up somehow. She’d just… die again. And then she’d see him, and the tree, and she could sit and talk longer without fear of Minato dying somewhere in the forest along with Jiraiya and everyone else she’d ever cared about.

And it might be nice, to see him, to see her father again and maybe get a few of those questions answered.

So if it went wrong that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, a win-win situation no matter how you looked at it.

In retrospect though it had probably been a terrible idea.

* * *

“Oh, hey… Lazy Nara, _what’s shaking_ … I mean shaking?” Sitting down, in the middle of the road, sweating, pale, and looking on the verge of death was Eru Lee.

Lee without Minato.

This went beyond troublesome into potentially dangerous. Unfortunately, Shikaku was on his own and was supposed to meet his team soon for afternoon training. As skilled of a jonin as his sensei was he might not be well informed enough to understand why ditching training to babysit Lee was extremely necessary.

“Lee, why are you sitting in the road?” He asked, and at his words she offered him one of her trickster grins, one that said there was a story behind this and one he probably wouldn’t approve of but that Lee would.

“Well, things got a little _wibbly-wobbly_ , sorry wobbly-wibbly, and you know… Sitting just seemed like a good idea for a while.”

“In the road?” Shikaku asked, and Lee didn’t nod, didn’t even move, just let him assume that yes the road was a perfect place to sit.

“Lee, where’s Minato?”

Lee started to cackle, and as she did Shikaku felt the ground tilt under his feet, turning his head he felt everything slanting downwards, the buildings, the road, the trees, everything except for Lee herself who stayed perfectly upright. He blinked and suddenly the world righted itself, nothing out of place, as if that moment had never happened.

“Minato’s tired, sleeping, we were almost killed by plant zombie ninjas, you know. That and we had to get Tsunade back and… and hey… hey… Lazy Nara, I’m going to learn how to poison people. That or I’ll die in a nauseous, sweating, mess but either way it will be… decently cool, right?”

When Lee said things were awesome generally that meant Shikaku’s day was about to take a turn for the surreal. Shikaku had learned, throughout the academy, that the world was a better place when it was predictable. If you could predict your classmates, the weather, if there was some sort of a strategy to follow then the world was an easier place to live in. When Lee became intrigued and or excited it generally meant one could only predict the unpredictable.

And when that happened it was time to mitigate damage.

Almost without thinking Shikaku squatted down, wrapped an arm under Lee’s shoulders, and supported her weight so that they were both standing.

“Whoa, _spinning_ , _spinning_ , _everything’s spinning_ …” Lee muttered in English protestations, none of the words Shikaku had bothered to memorize before, usually (unless she was talking under her breath with Minato) she only used English to swear or else make references to bizarre theater and literature from her home country.

He looked down the road towards where the training fields were, training which he was already late to, and then in the other direction towards the center of the village. He spared Lee another glance and realized that she really didn’t look good.

It wasn’t just the sweat, her skin had a sickly yellow cast to it that it normally lacked, and her green eyes seemed almost too bright as they gazed without focus back at him. Her hair was matted, her body stiff and heavy as she leaned against him, and in the direct sunlight she looked practically transparent.

Stuffing any regret and hesitation deep down in the corner of his mind, his sensei would understand a health emergency, he turned away from the training feels and walked with Lee towards the hospital.

“…I think I’m having an identity crisis.” Lee said, in a bit of a strained tone, but talking like this was any ordinary conversation they might be having.

“I think you might be very sick.” Shikaku replied stiffly, using most of his energy and chakra to support her weight rather than have an in depth conversation with an extremely ill Lee.  

“Poisoned, actually… Which turns out to be surprisingly _unpleasant_ , sorry, unpleasant… But I think the identity crisis might be worse, I mean more dangerous.” She sighed, as if this was all very troublesome and not in the least bit worrying, and continued, “I just… It’s not that I don’t know who I am anymore but I…”

“I think I’m more concerned about you being poisoned.” Shikaku responded, and she was lucky it was him, because anyone else would be screaming at her. As it was he picked up the pace, thought about shifting her to his back so that he could piggy back her in but…

“Oh, that… That’s fine… No big, not even a… thing.”

“Not a thing!” He didn’t stop, couldn’t stop, couldn’t even really turn to look at her but he could feel her stiffen slightly like she at least knew why he was upset.

“It’s… It’s really… I’m sort of immune to dying, I think.”

“You think?! You think you’re immune to dying?!” Troublesome, how could anyone possibly be so obliviously casually troublesome, and more how could he even continue to tolerate it? It’d been years now, and you’d think that at some point he’d just decide it wasn’t worthless and just… He didn’t even know what but he’d do something.

“It didn’t stick last time…” She said, offering him a weak smile before adding, in a less confident tone than he’d expect from her, “Sorry about this, by the way, normally it’d be Minato schlepping me around but…”

His anger deflated leaving nothing but resigned frustration in its place, because really, somehow Lee would always be Lee. And if she was talking like this, even with the sweating and the slurred speech, then surely she was going to be okay.

“It’s fine.”

“Not troublesome?” She prompted and to that he simply raised his eyebrows.

“Entirely troublesome, but you are troublesome, you can’t seem to help it.” He sighed, adding, “Besides, you’re my friend too.”

From her expression, a stunned blank thing, he wondered if she knew that. True, they hadn’t been friends at first. She’d always been with Minato and she’d seemed more hassle than she was worth. At first, the only reason he saw to hang around her, was her use as fangirl repellant.

Minato had never had fangirls in the academy and there was a very clear and simple reason for it. There was an inverse relationship between your emotional proximity to Eru Lee and the number of fangirls that were willing to approach you.

When Shikaku first started having lunch with the pair he’d noticed that all of the fangirls seemed to go away. They started making excuses, diverting their attentions onto Inoichi or else Fugaku instead, then Inoichi, Fugaku, and the Hyuga twins had caught on and it was as if all of the fangirls had disappeared completely.

Well, not completely, they still loitered in the bushes and apparently mustered up enough courage to even confront Lee at one point (which ended predictably in complete disaster) but to Shikaku it was as if they had disappeared completely.

Over the years though it’d become more than that, and while Inoichi and Chozu might always be his best friends, that didn’t mean he considered Lee and Minato to be outside of his circle of good friends either.

Without realizing it he reached the hospital doors and stood at the opening.

For a moment the sun seemed a little brighter and under it Lee almost seemed to glow, her hair the color of flower petals in the breeze, and she offered him a small but genuine smile.

Of course, all of this good feeling would be dashed when later, after he had admitted her to the hospital, he found out that she had crawled out the window and into the Forest of Death leaving a massive genjutsu in her wake to cover her tracks.

* * *

 

A half hour before Shikamaru found Eru Lee dying in the middle of the street all of Orochimaru’s experimental poisons were stolen while he was too busy dealing with a horde of Distraction Lees.

Needless to say, once he finally managed to slaughter the infestation of clones and went about cleaning and checking the inventory, he was not pleased.

In fact, one might say given the mass amounts of killing intent that leaked off of him as he exited his lab with blade in hand, that not pleased was quite the understatement and that if Eru Lee wasn’t the Shinigami then she should probably be afraid for her life.

* * *

Kushina was a girl on a mission, a feminist mission, one that could change the face of Konoha forever.

Kushina hadn’t spent that long in the academy but in the year that she was there she’d noticed that a lot of her female peers just weren’t with it. Aside from her, Uchiha Mikoto, and Eru Lee everyone seemed to spend all their time on make-up or whispering about boys. Now, Kushina didn’t have a problem with that, really, she liked being pretty too but…

But kunoichi, young kunoichi anyways, just didn’t seem to get that much respect.

There’d been three hokage so far and none of them had been a woman, and according to the recently resurrected hokages no woman had even been considered. And sure, Mito’s husband Hashirama had said there wasn’t really time to think about it, that apparently both he and Tobirama had had to choose in the middle of fighting but…

But still, the fact was, that no woman had even had a chance so far to be hokage!

It was more than that though. Kushina wasn’t on a genin team so she didn’t really know but with two guys on a team, and usually a male jonin sensei, it was hard to be the only kunoichi voice. Mikoto said that you tended to get relegated to the medical position or else to genjutsu because of smaller chakra stores but better control.

(Which was bullshit because Kushina had huge amounts of chakra but little control, so there went that stereotype!)

The girl was also the one who was supposed to know what all the flowers meant, how to seduce men, how to infiltrate all of these things that the boys hadn’t had to learn but they did for whatever reason.

The point was that Kushina had had enough and she was going to start a kunoichi club! A serious kunoichi club, not one just anyone could get into, one for girls who were more than prepared for what it took to be a shinobi and should be treated that way!

(And, her other unspoken reason, was that maybe it would be nice to have an excuse to invite Mikoto and even her arch pranking rival, Lee, to lunch every now and then or to come by while she was working with Mito-shishou.

Sometimes, when she was alone, it was too easy to think of Uzushio and everyone who no longer existed.)

Through hard work and dedication Kushina had been able to find Mikoto which just left Lee, who usually wasn’t too hard to find.

“Just follow the trail of destruction and she’s usually right there.” Mikoto pointed out as they walked along the main road of the village.

“I’m still going to beat her one of these days at pranking, believe it!” Kushina said, “That’s mission number one!”

“Mission number one of our kunoichi group is to beat Eru Lee at pranking?” Mikoto asked with dubious Uchiha eyebrows, cousins to the dubious Nara eyebrows or the condescending dubious Hyuga eyebrows but a little more tolerable.

“Hey, it’s a very important mission! For Konoha… I bet you Uncle Hashirama will want in.”

“You want your Uncle Hashirama, the shodaime hokage, to help us with our kunoichi group to beat Lee at pranking?”

“Don’t say it like that you make it sound really…” She trailed off waving her hand away, what did Mikoto know, it would be totally awesome. Kushina believed it.

And they still hadn’t even found Lee so it was all sort of moot point anyways. The village looked unnervingly normal, like it was any ordinary day of the week, and like Lee wasn’t inside of it, and Kushina didn’t like that at all.

Of course, she could always track Lee down later, maybe actually go to her apartment and ask around for her but that felt a little stalker-ish, not to mention then Minato would get involved and Minato, as a boy, wasn’t allowed in the club.

He was also far too pretty for anything this serious.

With a sigh Kushina stopped, steeled herself, not to give up but to think a little harder about where the strangely elusive Eru Lee might be.

“Alright, think, Kushina, if you were crazy Lee where would you go right now…” Kushina closed her eyes, pressed her fingers to her temples, and channeled her inner Lee.

“Uh, Kushina… I don’t think it works like that.”

“Sh, Mikoto, this is my concentration face! I’m seeing… getting a feeling of… ramen.” Kushina opened her eyes, everything suddenly clear with the thought of salty noodles.

“Ramen?” Mikoto asked, the dubious Uchiha eyebrows out to play again.

“Arch rival that she may be Eru Lee has a great understanding of the importance of ramen.” Possibly one of the few people in the world who could understand an Uzumaki’s love of the dish, the dish to conquer all dishes, one that Kushina had never managed to tire of no matter how many bowls she ate.

“…You know, Kushina, you may actually be right. Minato and Lee eat a terrifying amount of ramen, I actually don’t know if they’ve ever eaten anything else.”

“There’s no such thing as a terrifying amount of ramen.” Kushina responded in non-understanding, because there wasn’t, there just wasn’t a limit to how much ramen one could and should consume.

With that thought they turned and made a beeline for Ichiraku’s, Kushina grinning and in the lead, and Mikoto following willingly (if with raised Uchiha eyebrows) behind. And Kushina’s love of ramen didn’t fail her, because as soon as they closed in on the counter she could make out the only other hair in the entire village as red as hers if ten times as fluffy.

“LEE!” She shouted, sprinting down the road towards the girl, “I HAVE COME TO YOU WITH A MISSION FROM GOD!”

Normally that sort of a proclamation would have Lee very interested, extremely interested even, but instead of turning with a blank expression and the words, “I’m listening” Lee stiffened and shuddered.

Another odd thing that Kushina noticed was that flakey Minato was nowhere in sight. Which, while Minato was an unreliable pretty airhead, he usually wasn’t one when it came to Lee. In fact, he and Lee were ridiculously close… to the point of creepiness really.

Well, maybe it wasn’t that extreme. There were times when Kushina saw Minato without Lee or Lee without Minato but Minato’s absence combined with Lee’s strange reaction… It put Kushina a little on edge.

“ _The gods are conspiring against me_ …” Lee muttered, barely audible and completely unintelligible, into her ramen and with a great sigh Lee finally turned to look at her.

“Holy shit, Lee, you look like you died.” Lee was normally pale but today Lee was taking the cake, she was also sweating up a storm, covered in bloodstained clothing, and just looked like general hell.

However, in spite of all of this, Lee was still holding her own and sitting there at that counter she looked like she’d come crawling out of battle rather than crawling out of flower arranging class. Which was exactly what Kushina had been hoping for.

“Unfortunately… Unfortunately… I… can’t seem to finish my sentences.” Lee paused, took a deep breath, and started again, “I don’t think I’m in any condition for god missions at the moment… Come back later.” Lee offered them a rather pitiful smile and turned slowly, painfully slowly, back to the counter and her ramen and then placed her head on the table.

Mikoto and Kushina exchanged a look then sat down simultaneously on either side of Lee. Kushina spared a glance for the old man Ichiraku but he didn’t seem to be paying any attention, in spite of the fact that Lee was turning an interesting shade of green, glancing over at Mikoto Kushina could make out the mouthed words ‘genjutsu’ and realized that Lee must be warding off the man’s attention.

Suddenly things seemed a bit more serious than Kushina’s schemes.

“Lee, are you feeling alright?” Mikoto asked.

“I think… I think I’m dying.” Lee said before adding with a strange amount of bitterness for Lee, “Slowly, painfully slowly, I’m starting… starting to miss that kunai, _stabbing_ no stabbing is quick. Painful, but quick.”

“Dying?!” Kushina asked before forcing out laughter and slapping Lee on the back, trying to ignore the way the girl winced at the contact, “You don’t really mean it right, I mean… You should be in the hospital then, right?”

“There… Was there already…Wanted to die with ramen at least… Seemed like… good way to go.”

Kushina and Mikoto exchanged a long and pained glance, in it an entire conversation took place, and it went something like this.

“Do you think she’s serious?”

“Isn’t Lee always serious?”

“Yeah but serious Lee isn’t always serious.”

“I think she’s serious.”

“Seriously?”

“Look at her!”

“Holy shit, I think she’s serious. What do we do?”

“We’ve got to take her to the hospital.”

“But she’s already escaped from the hospital once!”

“We still have to take her somewhere!”

“Where else is there?!”

The moment passed and Kushina felt the only possible solution come to her, “Lee, we’ve got to take you to see Uncle Tobirama.”

He was one of the best healers there was, or at least he had been when he was alive the first time, and even though Kushina didn’t know him that well he’d know how to fix whatever was wrong with Lee and he’d be able to keep her from sneaking off to die with ramen too.

“Ugh… That sounds unpleasant…Pass.” Lee said, head still on the table.

With a nod towards Mikoto she and the other girl lifted Lee up together and dragged her away from the counter, slowly they made their way to Mito’s house where Kushina had been working with Uncle Tobirama earlier after he had been kicked out of some sort of meeting with the hokage.

“Seriously, Lee, isn’t Minato supposed to keep you out of situations like this?” Kushina couldn’t help but ask as they speedily walked along, “I always knew he was flakey but…”

At any other time Lee probably would have responded back but she just looked up at Kushina and slowly smiled, a fox’s trickster smile, and then with a large crack she and Mikoto stumbled forward finding themselves holding nothing.

Because Eru Lee had just teleported out of their arms.

She and Mikoto looked around, but there was no pile of leaves on the ground and nothing to indicate that Lee was anywhere nearby, leaving Kushina mildly panicked.

“Alright, alright, Mikoto, we just have to think!” Kushina said and then brought her fingers her to her temples once again and tried to clear her mind, “Alright, Kushina, if you were crazy Lee and you were dying of poison and you’d just teleported away from your super awesome rival where would you go…”

Nothing was coming to mind, just the ramen, and Lee wasn’t dumb enough to go straight back to the ramen!

“Hatake.” Mikoto suddenly said and Kushina looked up confused.

“Remember when Minato and Lee went on that crazy pranking streak against ANBU? According to my dad there was one agent who always managed to find her, Hatake Sakumo.”

And Kushina got it, “So, you’re saying, if we can find Hatake then he can find Lee.”

Mikoto just nodded, the concern evident in her expression, but didn’t offer any ideas of how to find him so that they could find Lee. But that was alright, because if there was one thing Kushina was great at it was getting attention and being loud.

“Come on, I have a plan!” And Kushina took off running through the streets, screaming at the top of her lungs, “HATAKE SAKUMO, COME FIND LEE BEFORE SHE CRAWLS INTO A TRENCH TO DIE!”

And although a lot of people told her to shut up, even threw things at her and Mikoto, it was a mission success when a man with silver hair appeared out of nowhere with a somewhat concerned expression and every amount of willingness to take her and Mikoto seriously.

And really, that was what the whole kunoichi club was supposed to be about anyways.

* * *

Minato woke up from his nap to bright sunlight, an empty apartment, and the feeling that he had missed something glaringly important.

It was a quiet uneasy sort of feeling, one that didn’t express itself in thoughts, so that there was nothing he could quite pin it down to. It was in the way the afternoon sunlight fell through the blinds, the movement of dust as he travelled here and there, and the serene quietness that pervaded the space.

A quiet gnawing feeling in the pit of his stomach, without rhyme, and without any real reason.

This feeling saw him putting on clothes, walking outside of the apartment door and locking it behind him, meandering through the village slowly with an open eye for everything, passing by Ichiraku’s, the red little bridge over the river, and all the usual places that Lee liked to frequent.

Eventually this slow wandering brought him outside of a restaurant window, one he hadn’t been to before, where he caught sight of Jiraiya and Tsunade sitting at a table. Tsunade looked dazed and flushed while Jiraiya looked vaguely apologetic if good natured.

Almost without thinking about it, Minato stepped inside, a small bell chiming to mark his entrance.

“Oh, hey, Minato-kun!” Jiraiya called, waving him over, “Come on over.”

Minato walked over and took a seat next to Jiraiya, feeling more than a little dazed himself, still uneasy.

“You lose Lee-chan somewhere?” His sensei asked, not too concerned, but also curious because it was rare to see Minato and Lee separate like this when there wasn’t a reason to be.

“No, I went to sleep for a bit and… she wasn’t there when I woke up.”

“Hm, I would have thought she’d want to hit the sack too after that last mission.” Jiraiya said with a sigh, “I swear, I can’t handle another C-rank like that. I’m getting too old for that kind of stuff.”

Tsunade snorted softly but didn’t remark, just took another sip of her drink.

“I… I’m worried about Lee.” And there it was, that’s what it was, that niggling doubt creeping in his mind.

Because Lee wasn’t okay, he knew that, she’d been edgy all day and he hadn’t thought about it because he needed rest and she needed rest but…

“She had a couple of close calls.” Jiraiya said darkly before adding, “But Lee-chan isn’t stupid, she’ll learn from her mistakes.”

“No, it’s not that it’s…” It was what happened when no one was watching, when she was by herself and she… died. Died and came back and no one would have noticed if she hadn’t said anything to Minato.

The Shinigami, what did that even mean?

“You want to talk to her about it?” Jiraiya asked and Minato nodded slowly.

“She’s probably fine but… I think she might not be thinking about everything clearly. She could do something…stupid.” It wasn’t anything she’d really said, or even anything she’d really done, but Minato got the feeling that Lee now considered herself expendable. Like it didn’t matter if she was hurt or dead because she could always just come back from it. And that sort of idea terrified him.

“Alright then, Tsunade and I were just about finished here anyways, so I guess we should go and hunt down Lee-chan.” Jiraiya said, standing, and then looked at Tsunade, “Sorry, princess, but believe me if you leave Lee-chan unattended too long…”

Tsunade downed her drink in one large swallow, stood, and said, “I heard about it all morning from sensei. I don’t think I want that girl unattended… And I think I want Hashirama’s necklace back.”

As they walked out Jiraiya casually asked, “Alright, so where have you looked so far?”

But before Minato could answer they all paused, watched in stunned fascination as a silver blur of ANBU shot past, followed by a streak of red and black in the forms of Uzumaki Kushina and Uchiha Mikoto.

Kushina screaming as she ran, “LEE, WHEN WE FIND YOU’RE GOING TO WISH YOU NEVER BAILED ON HOSPITALIZATION!”

This was followed shortly after by Nara Shikaku and his genin teammates, Shikaku wearing a look of quiet but furious motivation on his features, which was a warning sign to anyone knowing the Nara clan that shit was about to go down on an epic level.

And behind them all, walking slowly, the air curdling around him with the force of his killing intent, was Orochimaru, fingering the hilt of his katana with a cold smile.

For a moment Jiraiya, Tsunade, and Minato simply stared blinking after the procession. Then, with a calmness that he didn’t quite feel, Jiraiya said, “…I vote we follow the angry mob.”

* * *

At some point in the Forest of Death, what was left of Lee’s grasp on reality began to slip away, the trees twisted and hunched over, some twisting higher into the heavens, some growing limbs and faces and staring down at her with soulless wooden eyes. 

Tiger lilies sprouted in her footsteps, and when she sat down at the base of a particularly great tree, they grew like a sea in front of her, growing as high as wheat and concealing her from view, the flowers themselves glowing softly like embers in the dark.

Buried in them, leaning against the tree, she felt herself slip from her worn, twitching, body back under the shadow of a different, taller, tree.

It was still night in that other world, or perhaps it was simply that the tree was so large and dense that it blocked out the sun, either way once again there was nothing but the soft golden light to mark her path.

Standing slowly, and opening her eyes, she noted how light she felt and how much more clearheaded than she’d been only moments before. The grass was solid beneath her bare feet, her head no longer floating.

“Lee,” And there he was, still sitting on that branch, looking at her with such old, sad, eyes, “I had hoped that I might not see you for a long time.”

She walked towards him, much more confidently this time, and sat without prompting next to him, “I wanted to talk to you again. Well, that or gain immunization from deadly poisons, but either option seemed good at the time.”

“You wanted…” He trailed off and that bottomless sorrow was replaced by suspicion and rising irritation, his green eyes narrowed and his eyebrows lowered, “Don’t tell me you did this to yourself.”

“To be fair, I wasn’t explicitly trying to…” Die, she didn’t say, “But it was a possibility.”

“You do realize that death isn’t something to take lightly.” He chided.

“Isn’t it? For us?” For gods of death, wasn’t death all they really were, wasn’t this their more natural state?

He frowned, turning away from her for a moment before answering, and when he did his words were short and forced, “No, especially not for us.”

He sighed, “When I was very young I died quite a few times, many without even realizing it, and every time… It takes something from you.”

“Like what?” She asked, because she’d felt as if something had shifted and changed, but she hadn’t been able to put her finger on it all day.

“I don’t know, something integral.” He responded with a small, slow, smile.

But she didn’t feel like that, she felt more like it had been a realization, just one that was somewhat unnerving because the idea of her mortality had been pounded into her head since she was six. They made it very clear in the academy that if you were careless, if you were stupid, if you were unlucky you would die on the battlefield.

Very few ninjas lived to retirement and to make it to that age uninjured was considered a major art form.

To suddenly have that concern taken from her, only for it to remain in Minato and everyone else, was quite jarring. It also didn’t help that she was running on very little sleep and had been hallucinating for the past couple hours but it was all still a little unsettling.

Then again, maybe that’s why she’d really done all of this, so she could go and see this man who seemed to understand and see what he thought of all of this.

“Maybe it’s just something shifting instead.” She said, “Just changing perspective a little bit. It’s always been true just unacknowledged. Like thinking your father died in a car accident and then discovering he was the Shinigami the whole time.”

Then, at once, the smile faded and as he looked at her he looked lost and uncertain, hovering over words, “I… You know, Lee, that I’m not really your father.”

She looked him over, picking out the texture of his hair, the paleness of his skin, the shape of his face and his nose, and those too green eyes that she wore as well. If he wasn’t her father then they shared an unnatural amount of features in common.

“…Really?” She just asked dubiously and he must have understood what she was getting at because he flushed and looked absurdly hesitant and awkward.

“Really, it’s… complicated.” He finally settled on, before adding, “But I’m not your father.”

“Really.” She just repeated, complete and utter disbelief coloring her tone.

“You don’t believe me.” He stated, blankly, as if he had no idea why she would think he was her father.

“It would explain a lot.” She said, and he opened his mouth to argue, then closed it, then opened it again looking for that one argument that would somehow convince her that they weren’t actually related.

“…It would, but it’s just not true.” He settled for, haplessly shrugging, and looking hopelessly apologetic.

She frowned, but this wasn’t really what she’d come here for, well she ultimately had more or less wandered her way here but it wasn’t what she’d really wanted to talk about. Finally, she said, “So I have this friend, his name is Minato, and he’s not the illegitimate love child of the Shinigami.”

“You’re not the illegitimate love child of the Shinigami.” Death interjected by Lee easily ignored him and continued.

“And recently we’ve had a couple of really nasty missions, nastier than we’re prepared for, and I know that we’re doing all we can and I know that he’s smart and capable and in a couple of years we’ll both be forces to reckon with but… I guess I’m just worried. I mean, since I can’t seem to die, does that mean I should do more or less or…”

She basically had to rethink her entire career, because suddenly everything she’d been taught just didn’t apply to her anymore.

An immortal shinobi, it’d make a great western film but as a life it was a little bit jarring. Because, at the end of things, a shinobi more or less was their mortality.

Shinobi lived on the edge of life and death, horrifically aware of how close they were to violently leaving for the other world. Every time they tied the headband around their forehead they accepted that this may be the day they fail to return home. This might be the day that they must meet their maker and be judged for all their worth. Death walked in their shadows and clapped mockingly in the sound of their footsteps.

“First, again, I am not your father.” The man insisted, his eyes hard, but then he softened and continued, “Second, I’m not going to tell you how to live your life. How you act and what you do now is something you’re going to have to discover for yourself. If it were me… I’d be careful with how much I let people know, power like that is extremely tempting to those who shouldn’t have it. But I’m old and my childhood friends have been dead and buried for hundreds of thousands of years. You judge how much your friend is worth and how much you would be willing to sacrifice for him, and then live with it.”

“…That was a very intimidating speech.” Lee responded, not quite sure how to take it, since he’d essentially said she should just figure it out for herself. Which, well, she was, she had been. The trouble was, she didn’t know how much she was willing to sacrifice for Minato. Thinking about it, as she’d been crawling through Konoha looking for a place to pass away quietly, she’d had the alarming thought that there might be nothing she wouldn’t be willing to sacrifice.

Because Namikaze Minato was where her world had really begun, where life had begun to have purpose and meaning, and without him… Without him the world would be little more than a thin genjutsu without light or purpose inside of it.

And that terrified her.

“It’s a very intimidating thought.” He agreed mildly, “Probably one I couldn’t face when I was your age but… I think at your age I was a lot younger than you seem. I faced death on an almost yearly basis but I didn’t learn to live with it until many years later.”

“So, I should just do whatever I think is best?” She asked, eyebrows raised, before adding, “You’re very hands off with this sort of advice, father.”

That was actually very reminiscent of shinobi, ninja didn’t coddle, they cared but they wouldn’t coddle you or pretend the world was softer and safer than it was. It was a very tough love world out there and the Shinigami was fitting right in.

“I just think there are things that you won’t understand unless you see it for yourself. Also, still not your father.”

Well, that didn’t sound particularly good but it didn’t sound bad either, sort of what she’d expected honestly. In this strange world, sitting with her dad, learning all the secrets to life and death and the universe she felt a little more stable than she had that morning. Things hadn’t changed, she’d been overreacting, and she’d tell Minato that and not get into the whole poisons fiasco until they’d actually been taught something.

They had time before the chunin exams and if the plant zombies returned with a vengeance… Well, she’d think of something then.

She hopped off the tree with a grin on her face, breathing in the scent of the fruit above, and offered her father a small wave, “Of course not, father. I’ll be sure to check in sometime later, I mean, when I have the time or inconveniently die in the middle of battle.”

“Wait, what, no… I mean, I don’t mind seeing you but…”

She continued on while he stammered, ignoring everything he said, “And I’ll probably have to ask you a bunch of questions about flower arranging, secret clan techniques, boys, and all of those things I just never paid any attention to and am supposed to learn from a parental figure.”

She walked away, not listening as he jumped up after her, still talking to him as she walked back towards Konoha’s rather intimidating forest, “And I’ll try to bring you a souvenir, next time! And we’ll talk more about Jiraiya’s perverted habits and whether as a growing girl I should be concerned about him spying on me in the bath. We’ll have a nice, long, talk about everything and you can tell me about space jedi!”

And with that she hopped back into the land of the living, only to be confronted by fiery smoking craters, and everyone she ever knew staring at her with wide eyes, like they’d just seen her rise from the dead.

“…There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this.”


	9. Occam's Razor

_In which the sandaime is too old for this bullshit but Tsunade is too young for it, the sannin plus Sakumo all get very drunk trying to understand just what happened and Orochimaru’s feelings, and Eru Lee reveals that she learned absolutely nothing in the academy._

* * *

Sitting at the edge of Eru Lee’s hospital bed, watching as the girl was prodded continually by an enraged Tsunade, Hiruzen decided that he was decidedly too old for this bullshit.

This bullshit being the urgent missive he’d received from the summons of Hatake Sakumo, Jiraiya, Tsunade, and Orochimaru within a minute of each other as well as the hours long briefing he’d had with those four as well as the six genin who had been there at the time.

Of all of them, strangely or perhaps not, his briefing with Namikaze Minato had been the easiest and had provided the clearest understanding of the events.

“She’s a god.”

He’d said it so simply, where Jiraiya had struggled to explain how they’d found Lee dying of poison and delirious (somehow melting the world around her and setting it on fire without even realizing it) then dead and then suddenly in the next instant alive and awake and fine.

Even Orochimaru, as he’d recounted the events and tried to explain his theories behind her bloodline, had finally concluded that he simply didn’t know.

“She appears to have… very few limits.” Orochimaru had conceded only a short while before team seven’s second C-ranked mission, “Her chakra stores border on infinite and there appear to be no side effects to her use of nature chakra. What limits she does have are more conceptual, based on how she perceives our world, rather than because of chakra or even physics.”

Hiruzen had raised an eyebrow, glad that he’d gone out of his way to make sure Danzo was out of the loop for these conversations, and asked, “So you have no idea then?”

And then, with his usual biting mocking humor and a wry jagged smile, “Perhaps, sensei, she is the sage himself reincarnated.”

But in his meeting with Namikaze Minato there was no such desperate humor, only blunt and brutal honesty, from a little boy looking at him as if there was no room to doubt these words.

“That’s quite a specific explanation of the events, Namikaze-kun.”

The boy flushed but didn’t retract his statement, “She’s always been a god, hokage-sama, we just didn’t have the word for it before.”

“And why this word, then? There are some who would see the sharingan and see it as proof of divinity but as shinobi we are much more critical of what powers we assign a kekki genkai. God, Namikaze-kun, is a very powerful word.”

The boy pursed his lips for a moment, folded his hands together, and studied Hiruzen and finally slowly said, “She’s died before and come back from it. The plant nins were successful when we went to retrieve Tsunade-sama. She said she died in a river, met the Shinigami of some other universe, and was told that she was the Shinigami of this one.”

Then leaning forward Namikaze Minato fixed him with a look that Hiruzen very rarely saw from children his age or from ninja his rank, something sharp that leaked intent and focus and was not to be trifled with, “She is immune to death itself, she completed the nidaime’s edo tensei without any of the restrictions that should have been present, she’s never suffered anything close to chakra exhaustion, time and space mean nothing to her, and she said that the Shinigami looks like he might as well be her father. Why shouldn’t I believe her when she says that she’s a god of death?”

Looking at the girl in the bed, who looked healthy enough and more than a little bewildered by her situation and irritated by Tsunade’s constant poking and raging, he couldn’t help but think of that last question.

Why shouldn’t he believe that Eru Lee was the Shinigami itself?

“What the hell were you thinking brat?! What was your thought process?! I have a great idea, I’m lacking sleep and clearly not thinking straight I’ll go raid Orochimaru’s rare poison collection, poison myself with all of them at the same time, and build up my immunity, is that how that idea started?!” Tsunade, at the very least, after having ripped the necklace from the girl appeared to have gotten over her reluctance to work as a medic nin as well as whatever baffled stupor she’d been left in when Hiruzen had initially talked to her.

“…It seemed like a good idea at the time.” Lee answered with raised eyebrows and a somewhat alarmed expression as Tsunade drew blood, also having apparently gotten over her fear of blood after the Forest of Death scenario.

“So, you recognize that it was a pretty shitty idea now?”

“Well, in retrospect, yes.” The girl said before adding, “But I’m apparently also quite immune from dying so I didn’t really think there’d be that many consequences.”

This, Eru Lee should have known, was the completely wrong answer to give an enraged Tsunade. Although, Hiruzen couldn’t help but think, it was in some ways reminiscent of what Jiraiya and Tsunade had been like as genin. Jiraiya never managed to dig himself out of the metaphorical holes he’d plunge himself into with Tsunade on a daily basis.

“You don’t get to make terrible decisions because you’re apparently immune from dying!” Tsunade screeched before adding, “And you’re not immune from being stuck in the hospital for a week for observation because of your dumbass decisions!”

Hiruzen decided to take that as meaning Tsunade apparently would be staying in Konoha. He’d have preferred if she hadn’t needed bottomless rage at one of his genin to come back but at this point he’d take what he could get.

Lee blinked at Tsunade, her lips pursed, and finally concluded, “I liked you better when you didn’t want to stay in Konoha.”

This was also the wrong answer to give an enraged Senju Tsunade.

Eru Lee also discovered that while Tsunade would never hurt one of her patients and took her profession very seriously this would not stop her from hitting the girl over head with her clip board.

It was nice that the universe apparently hadn’t imploded on Hiruzen’s discovery that he had the Shinigami as one of his genin.

“Tsunade, if you don’t mind, I would like a chance to debrief the girl.” He finally cut in after Tsunade had met against Lee’s chakra shield and had started screaming to her about extreme use of chakra while she was in the hospital.

“Right, of course sensei.” Tsunade said, not quite flushing but at least having the decency to look somewhat chagrinned. This didn’t stop her from turning to Eru Lee though and threatening, “If I feel even one particle of chakra used from you then you won’t be seeing anything but these stale hospital walls for a month.”

Then she was out of the room, barking orders like she owned the place and medic nin scurrying left and right with a look of worship in their eyes at the slug princess’s sudden return, and he and Eru Lee just watched.

“I think I finally understand why only an angry nidaime could drag her back.” Lee concluded, which, now that Hiruzen thought about it was a rather terrifying thought. Although, Tsunade had more of an Uzumaki’s temper to her while Tobirama…

His temper had been entirely his own.

But while Hiruzen might rather discuss his sensei’s temper that wasn’t the conversation he needed to have at the moment, “Your friend Namikaze Minato told me that you’re a god.”

“Oh,” Lee simply said before calmly adding, “Yes, it seems very likely.”

Seeing Hiruzen’s patently unamused expression at this she asked, “Have you heard of _Occam’s Razor_?”

Naturally, as that was a phrase sounding as if it had come from her own native language, he hadn’t but it’d seemed like a rhetorical question at any rate because she continued soon enough with her own explanation.

“I’m sure shinobi have a word for the same thing, I just don’t know what it is yet, or haven’t really seen it. At any rate, it’s more of a principle than an object. It means that, in any given situation, the simplest explanation is most likely to be the accurate one.” She paused, her brow furrowed, and added, “It’s not necessarily the accurate one just… far more likely.”

And the simplest explanation was that she was a god?

He didn’t ask that, it wouldn’t get him anything new, instead, “And how exactly did you discover that you were a god?”

“To be honest, I was told, you know after dying via plant zombies but… Isn’t that how we all find things out?” She paused and explained, “If you sit down and think about it, everything we know, everything we take for granted, we have no real confirmation of. We were told, we saw it for ourselves, but we don’t really know. If you really sit down and think of what absolutely must exist and be true, then it’s only you yourself. You can’t confirm or deny my existence, Konoha’s existence, only your own.”

That was new, but then, shinobi as a general rule avoided philosophical conversations like that. Thinking about your role in life and why things were the way that they were generally was a long and winding path that lead either to madness or at the very least mandatory therapy.

Of course, Eru Lee was the only one he’d ever heard insist that the world was a giant illusion yet somehow remain a rational and competent shinobi.

“At any rate, that’s all very existential. I was told and… It made a lot of sense, so I’m choosing to believe in it.” She shrugged then with a sigh, “Maybe it’s not true, maybe that’s the wrong word, and when you put it that way nothing’s really different. I’ve always been this way and I probably always will be, why does it matter what we call it? All that really matters is that dying is now temporary which, I’ll admit, is a bit relieving.”

Minato had said something similar to him in his office, that this changed nothing, that only the way they viewed the world had changed. The world itself would always remain as it had been regardless of what they thought of it.

Eru Lee had always been a dangerously overpowered genin with abilities that no one could truly explain.

Hiruzen could understand that point of view, to a point, but the fact of the matter was throwing around words like Shinigami and expecting nothing to change was sheer naiveté no matter what sort of sense Eru and Namikaze believed it made.

Still, he considered what she said, and acknowledged in a sense that she was right. He could ignore her and Namikaze’s brazen declaration (and it was probably best for the health and sanity of Konoha if he did) and simply add immortality to the growing list of Eru’s techniques.

Of course, he was adding immortality as a technique mastered by a genin.

Yes, he was still too old for this bullshit.

“Eru-san, I have decided that it is in the best interest of the village to classify both your immortality technique and your… declaration of godhood as S-ranked secrets. Do you understand what that means?”

She blinked at him causing the pit in his stomach to deepen. He suddenly understood what Jiraiya must have felt on a daily basis.

“This means that unless it is unavoidable you will not reveal your immunity from death to anyone and you will not tell anyone that you are the Shinigami.”

“So… I won’t die?” Lee said with raised eyebrows and then added, “Well, I mean, I’ll try really hard not to but…”

“Try harder.”

“Right, well, I guess I’ll try harder.” The girl said looking somewhat out of sorts, as if she wasn’t quite sure how she was going to go about doing that, which Hiruzen didn’t blame her but he also hadn’t managed to get himself killed twice before his thirteenth birthday.

Most shinobi did not manage to get them killed before their thirteenth birthday.

Of course, then again, most of them did manage to get themselves killed before the age of twenty-five.

“Good, I’m glad you understand, when you’re released I’ll expect to see you in my office to go over precisely what this means.” Hiruzn stood, feeling at least ten years older than he actually was and offered her as kind of a smile as he could muster considering all of the paperwork he now had to fill out.

That, at the very least, had remained unchanged. The gods could be walking among men and the very fabric of reality could be tearing itself apart and he’d still have goddamned paperwork.

* * *

Jiraiya hadn’t thought that nightly drinking with Sakumo and Orochimaru would become a new thing but it apparently was. Well, they added in Tsunade and were now camped out in Jiraiya’s living room behind walls of seals so that they could bitch about goddamn S-ranked secrets (and one of these days they were just going to declare that Lee herself was one giant S-ranked secret), but the atmosphere had remained pretty much the same along with the reason.

Well, sort of, last time he’d sort of thought he had a handle on things, there was no such thought now.

This whole genin team thing was driving him to alcoholism and there seemed to be no sign of it stopping.

“You know, I’ve just got to stop worrying about it.” Jiraiya concluded after a shot of sake, “Just, let it go, pretend it’s all normal. I mean, I was doing a pretty good job before all of this. Suicidal clones, I don’t even blink now, raising the dead, not a problem…”

Tsunade snorted, interrupting his self-assurances with a slurred, “Good luck with that, moron.”

“Hey, I am serious! I am well on my way to being Lee desensitized! And besides, There’ve been sort of halfway immortal shinobi before. I mean, Oro, isn’t that like your life goal?” Not that it was a great life goal but if Orochimaru was seeking it out then there must have been some sign that it was doable and not… well… that weird.

(Personally Jiraiya thought it was a little unhealthy, would probably fester into something worse if Lee hadn’t donated her limitless supply of suicidal clones, and he still hoped Orochimaru would grow out of it and accept that they all met their maker at one point or another… Well, except for Lee, but apparently Lee didn’t count.

Either way, at least Orochimaru wasn’t doing anything morally apprehensible to get there, just killing a ridiculous amount of clones.)

Orochimaru gave no response, not even to call Jiraiya an idiot.

“Oro?”

Jiraiya looked over at Orochimaru, sitting in a dark corner, morosely sipping at his sake and looking as if there was no hope left in the world with metaphorical mushrooms flourishing on top of his head.

“Oro, you okay there?”

Orochimaru was extremely not okay shown by the fact that he didn’t even offer Jiaraiya his trademarked glare at expressing concern for his wellbeing. Which, well, Orochimaru was usually a stiff and ungrateful ass, so this was more than a little worrying.

“Jiraiya, you dumbass, he’s depressed.” Tsunade said after a swig of sake, somehow further along than Jiraiya and Sakumo combined.

“Depressed, why would he be depressed?” Sakumo asked speaking up for perhaps the first time that evening, “I’m just… generally alarmed.”

“Generally alarmed, that’s weak Sakumo. Generally alarmed wouldn’t have you leaving your toddler with Maito Dai so you could drink it up with me and the gang.”

Sakumo had the decency to look embarrassed by that, flushing slightly, but defended himself with, “When Kakashi learns that I saw my future apprentice poison herself, destroy a good third of the Forest of Death, and then rise from the dead he’ll understand why I had to drink.”

“Oh, yeah, I’m sure your two-year-old son will be very understanding.” Jiraiya retorted, tipping back another shot of sake as he did so.

“Well, maybe not now but in a few years…”

Jiraiya abruptly and drunkenly cut him off as the other thing Sakumo had said finally crawled into his brain, “Wait a minute, you still want Lee-chan as an apprentice?”

“Of course.” Like there was nothing at all alarming about this statement.

“Of course?!” Jiraiya just parroted, and god that was a Lee statement if there ever was one, blandly saying something that no one could process.

Before Jiraiya could ask in god’s name why Sakumo was still hell bent on training Lee to be the next… Oh, he didn’t know, katana wielding sabotaging one-man destroyer of villages there was a large thwack on the back of his head.

“Hey, Jiraiya, focus on Oro for a minute would you?” Tsunade said causing him to glance back at Orochimaru who still hadn’t moved and looked seconds away from death by despair. Really, they were talking about him like he wasn’t even there and he didn’t seem to give any shits.

That really was alarming, almost more alarming than Lee, and that was saying something, “Oh, right, so… he’s depressed?”

This apparently wasn’t the answer that Tsunade was looking for, “Idiots, think about it, I haven’t even been here and I know why.”

Jiraiya spared a glance to Sakumo who simply shrugged back as if to say, ‘Isn’t he your antisocial mess of a friend?’

Which, yes, yes he was but that didn’t mean Jiraiya actually understood him half the time.

Feeling completely clueless with no idea what the actual answer was Jiraiya had the horrifying feeling that this was how Lee felt all the goddamn time. Which, really, just made him want to keep drinking.

“Seriously, Jiraiya?”

“What? I mean, obviously there’s the immortality…” He was cut off by a loud groan from Tsunade at his complete stupidity.

It was his undisputed role on his team to be the village idiot and he’d forgotten how much he hadn’t missed it. In that way his own genin team, the new team seven, was actually pretty nice. Haru might not be as intuitive as the other two, and Lee gave him hell for it, but they never really called him stupid. Less talented, yes, but not stupid.

“First, let’s look at my granduncle’s technique. Orochimaru was working on the edo tensei when we were still in the war, it’s been years, and then out of nowhere Eru Lee apparently perfects it in one minute so that she can get unlimited ramen.”

“Oh, right…” Jiraiya hadn’t honestly thought about that, well he had, but mostly he considered it from the perspective of ‘oh shit, the hokages are all alive’ rather than how Orochimaru himself must have felt about that.

Tsunade continued on then, “Second, she’s apparently incredibly gifted in ninjutsu, to the point where she’s mastered S-ranked techniques as a twelve-year-old with barely any effort needed. In two years or even a year she’s going to be a nightmare out in the field. Orochimaru was considered a genius and we all know that he was nowhere close to where she is now.”

That was true but considering that Orochimaru had been the undisputed genius of their year Jiraiya didn’t have too much pity. If there was anything he’d learned in those years was that there was always going to be some asshole more talented than you. You couldn’t let it be about talent otherwise you’d be finished before you even started.

“Now, he finds out, she can’t die and is effortlessly immortal. Your Lee managed to do everything Orochimaru wanted to without even realizing she’s doing it or even putting in real effort. Hence, depression.”

That made an eerie amount of sense. He looked over at Orochimaru again, noting the dull eyed glance that he spared him, and Jiraiya knew he wasn’t deaf and had just heard every word they said but he still didn’t seem inclined to care.

“Oro?” He asked again, waiting only a moment for an answer that didn’t come, and then added, “You know, I really think… You’ve got to let it go. She’s clearly not… Well, you can’t take it personally.”

For a moment Orochimaru continued to sprout mushrooms gloomily in his corner, then he collected himself and stood, placed his glass on Jiraiya’s table and said quietly, “Eru Lee once said to me that there was a theory that when you die, if you were morally reprehensible, then you are punished for eternity for your crimes. She said someone theorized that this place, this hell, was other people. My hell, Jiraiya, is Eru Lee.”

He walked out the door and slammed it behind him leaving Jiraiya, Tsunade, and Sakumo blinking in his wake.

“…Well, I think I’m concerned.” Jiraiya summarized and received only silent drinking in response.

* * *

“I really don’t see what the big deal is.” Lee concluded to Minato on her third day of imprisonment inside of the hospital, “I mean, I got over it pretty quickly.”

Lee had ended up getting a lot of visitors, more than she expected really given that she wasn’t actually sick. Senju Tsunade, apparently, actually was a force to be reckoned with and possibly the most terrifying of the sannin. Which, really, who would have guessed with Orochimaru around.

Orochimaru though was different, you knew he was terrifying and plotting your death at every moment, Tsunade had more or less seemed normal if hopelessly drunk. That, however, was before Lee had died a horrific fiery poisoned death right in front of her.

Now Lee had learned to respect the wrath of the slug princess, or at least, respect her order to stay put in the hospital while she ran diagnostic tests or else face the wrath of the clip boards.

Still, team seven had made an appearance, the two formerly deceased hokages, Hatake Sakumo, Kushina and her Uchiha friend whose name Lee didn’t always manage to remember, Lazy Nara, and pretty much everyone she and Minato had hung around in the academy.

None of them had been that sympathetic, bewildered and insulted once they got over their bewilderment, but not sympathetic. She’d thought the Uchiha would at least have been grateful after apparently getting a sharingan out of it but apparently not.

Minato, after three days, was doing nothing to break this trend.

“Lee, you poisoned yourself with six different incredibly lethal poisons, all lacking antidotes, in the space of a few hours.” Minato, apparently, was still pretty miffed at her about all of that.

He’d been worse the first day, not even really talking to her when he Jiraiya and Dead Last had visited, but by the third day he had at least started speaking to her even if he glared a lot. And that had… well it had hurt. Not too much now, three days after the fact, but Minato had always more or less understood.

And true, Minato hadn’t exactly been there at the time and she thought that was a lot of what was going on but… But she couldn’t remember if he’d ever really been that upset with her before. Not that he was really upset, after all he wasn’t even purple yet in the face like uncle Vernon used to get, but he was… displeased.

“I have admitted multiple times that it wasn’t my best idea ever and that I probably won’t do it again.” Lee said, because she really had and she really was getting tired of all of this. Minato’s glare just intensified and Lee relented, “Fine, but you seemed to get over it quickly enough.”

“I’m not over it.”

Well, then, he’d get over it eventually.

“Right, well, I am… sorry.” Lee eventually bit out and at that something in Minato seemed to relent, his glare disappeared and he offered a small nod as well as a small bowl of takeout ramen.

Lee practically inhaled it and in between bites got out, “Minato, you are a precious cinnamon roll.”

Minato didn’t respond, just sheepishly sort of rubbed the back of his head, and then moved on to his next topic, “So, how long is Tsunade-sama keeping you in here?”

“I have four more days until sweet freedom.” Lee said, trying and failing to speak clearly in between noodles. And it would be beautiful, and not sanitized, and she’d love every minute of it.

“Is there anything actually wrong with you?” Minato asked and Lee shrugged.

“Well, I apparently have more chakra than can safely flow inside of a human body but that’s not new… Oh, I do also, apparently, have foreign chakra in my brain.”

Minato’s eyes widened and he scooted closer, watching as she finished the ramen with a contented sigh, “Oh, that’s… That doesn’t sound good.”

“You think so?” Lee asked because Tsunade hadn’t really been clear when she’d found it, just sort of run around and then Tobirama had shown up and he’d sort of run around for a while, and then they’d disappeared somewhere and Lee hadn’t seen them since.

“Well, doesn’t that mean someone else’s or something else’s chakra is inside of your brain?” Minato asked looking more alarmed by the second as he stared at her.

“I don’t know, I guess, I always assumed chakra was kind of like the _force_ though. It has a dark side, a light side, and it holds the universe together.”

“That’s… Chakra’s nothing like that.” Minato said, rather blandly, as if he wasn’t quite sure how to feel about that.

“It isn’t?” Lee asked.

“No.”

Well, that just showed how often she’d been sleeping in the academy or at least not paying attention. It hadn’t seemed to make a difference in her ability to use ninjutsu and didn’t really seem that important, until now at least.

“Huh, well, what is it like?” Lee asked, Minato would know, having been the one who actually paid attention in his classes.

“Well, no one really knows.” Minato said, almost hesitantly as if this really wasn’t what he wanted to say or talk about but wasn’t really willing to talk about anything else.

“Then why do we assume it’s a bad thing?”

“It’s not… It’s not just energy Lee, everyone has a specific chakra signature, it’s unique. The nidaime said that basically chakra is the closest thing we have to a physical soul.” He paused and then said moving closer to her bed, “Lee, that basically means that someone’s soul is inside of your brain!”

When he put it like that it did sound vaguely alarming. Which, maybe it didn’t have to be, considering the fact that she couldn’t really stay permanently dead but Minato probably didn’t want her pointing that out.

As it was she was sort of wondering how someone’s chakra soul could have possibly wound up inside of her brain.

Before she could say anything about that though the door slammed open revealing Senju Tsunade and the nidaime and the very calm and collected announcement of, “Don’t panic, Eru-san, we’re taking you into surgery.”

And in spite of being immortal and impervious to anything as lasting as dying Lee couldn’t help but feel a twinge of panic at that statement and the way she was, almost without warning, whisked from the room and wheeled to an operating table.

* * *

Tobirama sat in a tall chair above a table where Eru Lee was laid out unconscious, having been knocked out and monitored by Tsunade, carefully examining the foreign seal with a jar of ink nearby and a brush in his hand.

Outside in the hallway the boy, Namikaze, was peering through the locked door trying to get a glimpse of what was going on but Tobirama shut him out. Now wasn’t the time to focus on him or his grandniece but instead on the world of seals and negating them.

“I’ve never seen anything like this.” He muttered as he stared at it, not for the first time either, as Tsunade had brought him in earlier.

It was simple, far simpler than most seals were, a simple jagged lightning bolt seemingly carved into the skin as a scar rather than tattooed. There was nothing like this in Uzushio or any land or clan dedicated to fuinjutsu in the way the Uzumaki were.

“Do we need to get Mito?” Tsunade asked but Tobirama shook his head, she’d been lucky that he’d been on his way to visit Eru Lee himself.

“No, I should be proficient enough for this.” He said, “We know what it does, that’s half the battle.”

Of course, it was something that Tobirama himself had never considered. In some ways it was similar to the edo tensei, not in the fact that that was kinjutsu versus fuinjutsu but in how it worked. The edo tensei took a living sacrifice and overwrote their chakra signature with that of the deceased. It essentially flooded a body with foreign chakra thereby forcing out the original spirit that had resided there and transforming it into a temporary vessel for the dead. That had never been the true end though, he’d always considered it the great flaw of the technique, one that prevented him from ever wanting to use it.

He’d never thought of it as the end in and of itself.

But if he was a seal’s master who lacked scruples, who hungered for power almost beyond comprehension, and he knew of the Eru blood limit, knew of her apparent immortality…

A small simple seal, easily mistaken as a scar, placed away from any of the chakra gates where it would be immediately identified and not actively pumping in chakra but only storing a small amount so that when the girl reached chakra exhaustion she would lose control of her body completely.

It was genius even while it stood against everything Tobirama had ever believed in.

With that thought he turned to his grandniece, “Bring the boy back in, tell him we need chakra absorbent paper for a seal. When we extract the foreign chakra from the seal we’re going to need a place to store it.”

“Store it?” She asked, “You want to store it?”

“We know nothing about Eru Lee or where she came from, she appears to know nothing about it either, but whoever’s inside of that,” he pointed to the seal, “does and interrogating him might be our best source of information.”

How exactly they were going to manage that was a question for later, for now storing the chakra would be the best they could do.

Tsunade groaned placing a hand over her face and shaking her head back and forth, “God, I am not old enough for this kind of bullshit.”

Abruptly Tobirama found himself distracted from the situation and his thoughts returning to Tsunade, who had at least started to become productive again, but still apparently was an ungrateful brat.

“It’s your karma for drinking and gambling away while Hashirama and I rolled in our graves.” He bit out earning a glare from her.

“You weren’t even there! You have no idea the kind of pain I went through!”

“I don’t care about the kind of pain you went through when you don’t even seem concerned about understanding mine!”

“Oh, and you can just assume that yours was so much worse…”

“Hashirama was the only brother I had who survived childhood and even he didn’t live to see thirty!”

“None of my brothers survived childhood!”

Somehow, while hoarse whispering at each other, they’d drawn close enough to stare into the whites of each other’s eyes, and abruptly they both remembered the unconscious Eru Lee on the table.

Tsunade backed up, “Right, Jiraiya’s brat, I’ll be right back.”

Opening the door she yelled out, “Hey, blondie, run to Jiraiya and grab a stack of sealing parchment!”

The boy stared for a moment, his face paled as he looked inside at the unconscious Lee, and then he bolted running at a decent chunin’s speed out of the hospital and towards his sensei’s house. He was talented, overshadowed in some ways by the girl but it’d be interesting to see where he would go from here.

But that wasn’t a thought for now, for now there was the girl and the seal, “Fortunately this seal would never work, it functions, but he failed to consider her chakra reserves. They’re too large and replenish too quickly for any amount of his own chakra to overtake hers.”

Although perhaps he had considered that, because while relatively small compared to Lee’s reserves the amount of chakra inside of the seal was quite large, perhaps a third the amount of a very powerful jonin.

Which meant there was no rush, not truly, but the sooner they got it out the better he would feel about all of this. But, at the same time, it meant he didn’t need to feel panicked waiting on Namikaze Minato.

Tsunade interrupted his thoughts, “Sorry, about what I said.”

He looked up and found her looking hesitant as she stared down at the girl, fingering Hashirama’s necklace which she’d stolen back from her, “No one should compare their tragedies like one is any worse than the other and… When I left, I honestly didn’t think about what you and my grandfather would have thought about it.”

For a moment he didn’t want to say anything, didn’t feel the need to, after all he wasn’t the one who had spat on his own grave. The moment passed though and with it he felt tired and older than he should.

He sighed and said, “You don’t understand what our world used to be like, you didn’t live in it but then… I didn’t live in yours either. I’m an old dead man, what do I know?”

“Not old, I’d prefer it if you were old, you’re all making me look old.”

He offered her a small, wry, smile, “This situation makes me feel very old.”

She barked a harsh laugh, “I’ll drink to that, gruncle.”

“Don’t call me gruncle.”

They sat in amiable silence, looking at each other in a pleasant light for perhaps the first time since Tobirama had passed on, and then inevitably their eyes turned back to the strange seal on the girl’s forehead.

“So, what bombshell do you think this is going to drop?”


	10. Good Cops, Bad Cops, and Minato Cops

_In which the nidaime makes his priorities clear to a hospitalized Eru Lee, Jiraiya tries to invent a new word much to everyone’s irritation, and Lee finally admits that Dead Last is good for something._

* * *

Lee blinked slowly into awareness. Her vision was fuzzy in a way that spoke of head injuries or else the after effects of almost drowning. Blinking enough seemed to fix this, or, well, fix most of the problems. However, she did feel like she had been thrown into a washing machine set on high, and then had the shit kicked out of her by Jiraiya when he was trying to teach her that taijutsu was damn important.

(Jiraiya, a taijutsu and fuinjutsu specialist, was very big on the importance of taijutsu and not getting stabbed to death. Which, after being stabbed to death by plant zombies, Lee was actually starting to see his point.)

Above her she spotted the nidaime, rolling down his sleeves and setting aside several jars of ink and a stained brush. In front of him though was a scroll of thick parchment, opened to reveal unfamiliar characters written in glowing and somehow buzzing ink.

She attempted to sit up, strained her neck to get a better view, but before she could roll into a sitting position the man’s voice interrupted her, “Don’t try to get up. You’ve been out for three hours.”

She fell back, feeling all of her muscles protest and only managed the eloquent complaint of, “Guh.”

She also noted, dully, that her head felt as if it had been drilled into by jackhammers. Carefully she brought her fingers up to her forehead, but again before she could reach the source of the dull ache the nidaime interrupted with, “And don’t even think of touching that seal, it’s still fresh.”

She withdrew her fingers and let her arm fall back to her side and offered Senju Tobirama a somewhat irritated glare.

He didn’t seem interested in paying her any attention though, just cleaning up his supplies, supplies that Lee vaguely remembered seeing in the rush to get her into an operating room but hadn’t really paid too much attention to at the time.

Compared to the thought of surgery and having her brain cut open it hadn’t seemed that important.

She watched him for a few moments, waited until he seemed to be almost finished, and said, “I feel terrible.” 

He turned towards her, eyebrows raised, and said wryly, “You probably will for some time. We did, after all, forcibly extract a significant amount of chakra without the use of a gate.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Lee asked and here the man’s expression turned a little towards condescending. Not that the nidaime was ever really condescending, that sort of word was reserved for Orochimaru. No, if anything, the nidaime was just incessantly annoyed with everything around him.

“It means, Eru Lee, that I just ripped someone’s soul out of your brain without killing you.” The man said and, judging from the way he said it, Lee was supposed to be impressed.

It probably was damn impressive but as it was Lee really wasn’t in the mood to be impressed. Mostly she was just uncomfortably sore, had a killer headache, and apparently wasn’t supposed to touch her forehead because the seal was still fresh or whatever that meant.

“That’s cool, so, when will I feel like I wasn’t run over by a truck?” She asked, and she did mean this to be somewhat accusing and at least slightly intimidating but apparently trying to intimidate hokages was just cute because all the man did was smile.

“Soon, perhaps.” Was his very non-helpful answer.

Lee just stared back blankly for a moment, looked down at the hospital bed and then looked back to him.

Lee decided that it was officially time for her to leave the hospital.

She didn’t sit up, but instead gathered chakra and concentrated, willing herself to focus long enough to picture her and Minato’s apartment and sweet freedom…

“Whatever you’re thinking of doing I feel it best to remind you that Tsunade has not left this hospital, simply the room, and if she returns to find you absent, well, I can’t be held responsible for what she’ll do to you.”

Lee’s concentration was immediately gone, because she was pretty sure that Senju Tsunade had found out where she lived, and when you put it like that nowhere was safe. At least, not in her current condition.

“Since when are you and ungrateful grandniece friends?” She asked and he shrugged like it was no big deal that he and Senju Tsunade were even on speaking terms. Like they hadn’t, only a few days ago, been two seconds from ripping each other’s throats out in a family feud.

“For the greater good I am willing to put aside my grievances.” Meaning, he was willing to let Tsunade be happy if it meant watching Lee suffer.

She sighed and reached for her inner zen that would allow her to get through this all still sane. Hospitals, Lee had discovered she really didn’t like hospitals, “Well, it’s only four more days.”

“Oh, far more than that now.” The nidaime mused, seemingly oblivious to Lee’s widening eyes and paling face at his words.

“What?!” If she could fall out of her bed she would, but she could curl on her side and stare at the nidaime, praying to a god she didn’t believe in for him to take pity on her and tell her that the man was joking.

But he wasn’t joking, no, he was enjoying this.

Even as he stored his jars of ink and brush in some other scroll and then eyed the mysterious glowing scroll of doom with raised eyebrows and a small frown he was enjoying every second of her discomfort.

“You said it yourself, you’re in no condition for combat at the moment.” He mused as his eyes traced the lines on the scroll carefully.

“That doesn’t mean hospital!” Lee shouted, ignoring her pain and trying to roll out of the bed, only to be hit with a crippling wave of nausea.

“No, but Mito needing to go over my work and check to see if I’ve made any errors does.” He looked over at her, his tone almost sympathetic but a bit too patronizing to match, while his expression was just that small amused smile, “I’m afraid you’re stuck, Lee-chan.”

Oh, he was very good. To be expected from the nidaime hokage, perhaps, but she’d still underestimated him. Her textbooks had not prepared her for this. True they’d sort of said that Senju Tobirama was the sneakiest bastard of the hokages, and perhaps the most terrifying in some ways, but she hadn’t thought about what that meant when she’d resurrected him Lazarus style.

Lee rolled back onto her back, stared at the ceiling, and glared at it to express her discontent with the situation. Finally, when it seemed like the nidaime would probably just silently leave, she got to the point and asked, “What does she need to check, anyways?”

The nidaime paused, set the scroll back down again, and gave her an assessing look.

“How long has that seal been on your forehead?”

She blinked, momentarily thrown out of focus, “Seal?”

The nidaime traced a lightning bolt in the air with a finger and it clicked, “Oh, the scar? Well, I got that when I was a baby in the car accident… I think, that’s what the Dursley’s said but who really knows. Why, what about it?”

He didn’t answer though, just muttered, “Hm, I thought so.”

Before she could ask what the hell that was supposed to mean he continued, “That scar was actually a seal, specifically a type of storage seal for foreign chakra. What this means is that this foreign chakra has been inside of your system for nearly all of your life. It also means that, in order to safely extract this chakra, I had to first alter the seal to remove the chakra and then alter it again to keep different foreign chakra from seeping in.”

That sounded very technical and complicated, and probably important to her health. However, Lee was still in the Star Wars explanation camp, if only because it was less complicated.

Dark side, light side, use the force Luke, pretty damn easy to wrap your head around and there was none of this personalized chakra in your brain nonsense.

He pointed to her forehead, to where the scar was, or seal, or whatever there was had been, “Whoever did that to you used an entirely different school of fuinjutsu than Uzushio’s, he also used an unbelievably simple design for a very complicated task without placing it near a chakra gate or your reserves. Believe me when I say that it is a very good idea to have a second master’s opinion.”

Again that sounded a bit more technical than Lee really cared to understand when she was feeling like complete shit. Then she realized what he’d said.

“Wait a minute,” Lee said, her own eyebrows raised dubiously, “You’re making it sound like a shinobi carved this on my forehead when I was a baby.”

He didn’t deny it, just sort of stared at her with a nonplussed expression on his face, like it was obvious that a shinobi carved it on her head when she was a baby. Lee had the sinking feeling that the universe was acting up again, that it was malfunctioning, and covering that malfunction with a seemingly logical explanation.

At least, to everyone else, it never quite managed to convince Lee of anything. But then, it didn’t seem to care about convincing Lee.

“I got this in a car accident.” Lee said, slowly, to be certain he understood.

“Or so you were told.” He countered in a bit too patronizing of a manner for Lee to handle in her current condition.

“So you’re saying that a shinobi, in a place where I had never seen shinobi in four years of living there, placed some sort of chakra seal on my forehead to… To do what? What would that accomplish?” Lee asked throwing her hands in the air.

“I imagine he thought he’d possess your body and gain limitless power as well as immortality.”

Well, when he put it like that, “Oh.”

For a moment she considered that very logical theory that the nidaime had come up with and then considered her own early childhood in Number Four Privet Drive. Specifically, the lack of malicious shinobi attempting to possess her body with fuinjutsu.

“But there are still no shinobi in _England_.”

He scoffed, picked up the scroll and unrolled it in front of her so that she was staring directly into the strange glowing characters, “According to this, there are. Quite a powerful one too, by the amount of chakra he could sacrifice to store inside of your head.”

“Yeah, that glowing thing, what is that?” Lee asked.

“That, Eru Lee, is our friend the foreign seals master.”

She took a look again, at the glowing characters, then back at the nidaime, “That glowing thing is the shinobi in my brain?”

“Well, a sizeable portion of his chakra.”

They both stared at it, and Lee said what they were probably both thinking, “Seems a little anticlimactic.”

“Yes, well, now I have to figure a way to get it out and put it in some kind of a vessel.” Tobirama said with a sigh.

“Sounds hard.” Lee finally said to which he sighed again, which probably was his way of saying that Lee was right.

“It will most likely be extremely difficult; and possibly also involve puppetry.” Puppetry, apparently was pretty damn difficult if the nidaime’s expression was anything to go by.

“When you say vessel, then, you really mean a body.” Lee pointed out.

“I suppose.” He muttered distractedly as he continued to eye the seal as if it personally was causing him all these problems.

Lee stared at him, waiting for him to put two and two together, but apparently it was his off day because he just wasn’t getting it.

Finally, Lee said, “You know, I’m great at making bodies.”

* * *

Uzumaki Mito’s first thoughts, after she had been debriefed on the situation and brought out of retirement into a room behind the one-way mirror in T&I, “You’re shitting me.”

Tobirama would have winced, if he was a younger man and had the lack of composure of Hashirama, but he had lived through the clan wars, inherited the title of hokage and practically built the administrative infrastructure of the village, and was damn well too old to be intimidated by his sister in law.

Even if she was, admittedly, quite terrifying.

Although, he’d always liked that about Mito. He’d never thought it was possible to keep Hashirama in line, and it wasn’t, but Mito had come pretty close.

Still, Mito looked less than amused, “You’re telling me that you were brought back from the dead, not by Hiruzen’s student, but by a twelve-year-old girl who Orochimaru bribed with ramen.”

Tobirama could interrupt her at that point, try to say it was more complicated than that, if only for the fact that it really did seem to boil down to Eru Lee’s love of ramen and Orochimaru’s own boundless hubris.

“And, not only did she raise you and my husband from the dead for practically no reason, but she’s also immortal and had a foreign genius seals master’s chakra lodged inside of her brain for eleven years.”

Well, when she put it like that… Sometimes, Tobirama wondered if he wasn’t still dead and that the afterlife was just some convoluted bizarre version of reality that tried to baffle him at every turn.

“So it seems.”

She just spared him a dull look, looked through the window into the other room at the pale dark haired man strapped to the chair and covered in chakra suppression seals, “You brought me out of retirement for this bullshit?”

“I have also been brought out of retirement for this bullshit.” Tobirama kindly reminded her but Mito was having none of that.

“Please, you’ve been bored stiff sitting in my house just waiting for an opportunity like this to fall into your lap. Unlike you, I am a functioning member of society with an apprentice to train and a demon fox in my stomach. I don’t have time for this bullshit.” Mito sniffed, looking more irritated at this than anything, failing to mention that unlike her Tobirama was still a young man in his prime with years ahead of him.

Neither he nor Hashirama had discussed it, or even truly mentioned it, but that Uzumaki girl she was training had been chosen to be the replacement jinchuuriki. Uzumaki Mito, one of the last Uzumaki, was nearing her end and none of them were quite sure how to broach that topic.

Or even the topic that there could be a way out, a way for her to remain, if they were willing to approach Eru Lee.

“Regardless, here we are.” Tobirama stated.

“Right, and why am I here?” Mito finally asked, Tobirama just gave her a look because Mito knew exactly why she was here. Mito was the last great fuinjutsu master to come from the Uzumaki clan, and while Tobirama was close to her proficiency he would ultimately defer to her judgement.

Tobirama opened the notebook he’d brought with him, filled with half-finished sketches of seals and notes on techniques, many of them based upon those created by Eru Lee (because he’d be damned if he didn’t figure out that grabbing jutsu or shield technique for himself) and finally stopped at his latest entry of the seal.

“This man, made a seal comparable to a jinchuuriki’s, out of this on an infant’s forehead, carved into the skin without ink.”

Mito peered at it, brought it closer, and then blinked at it, “Just this squiggle?”

“Just that squiggle.” Tobirama confirmed, “I would rather have you here to hear whatever theories he has and his background than have to bring my censored notes to you later.”

She grimaced, took the notebook from him and scanned through his notes, “So here I am.”

“So here you are.” Tobirama agreed.

Well, here they were waiting for Hiruzen to find a suitable interrogator and whoever else he felt would be necessary for something like this, whether that would be his students or someone else. He probably was also sneaking in a few drinks of sake given that Tobirama had doubled his paperwork in the course of a day.

Which, really, Tobirama had no sympathy because they should have been on top of this England thing years ago.

Tobirama had found out rather early into his resurrection that no one seemed to care about Eru’s homeland. It was a place no one had ever heard of and no one had ever been to, that hadn’t seemed relevant in the seven years that the girl had lived in Konoha, and that even the hokage had eventually brushed aside as being unimportant.

A tiny rain soaked island somewhere in the north with no shinobi and no hint of becoming an international player. Only known as a small trivia fact for those who were close enough to wonder about Eru Lee and just where she came from.

Now, however, they had a fuinjutsu master who had attempted to gain seemingly ultimate power through Eru Lee’s blood limits and suddenly England became important.

“How’d you get him inside of a body.” Mito suddenly asked, staring through the glass, probably only just realizing it wasn’t a sophisticated puppet.

“How do you think I got him inside of a body?” Tobirama asked, “Eru Lee offered in exchange for my distracting Tsunade for a few hours.”

“You’re kidding.” Mito said to which he just shook his head rather sadly, Lee really did consider distracting Tsunade equal to creating a functioning human body out of nothing.  

“Right, well, is that what he actually looks like?” Mito asked motioning to the man.

“I believe so.” A similar thing happened to the victims of his own edo tensei, after all, the foreign chakra would take over the weakened body and morph it into their own image. It explained why he and Hashirama actually looked like themselves and weren’t, well, whatever Eru Lee thought they should have looked like.

Certainly he looked foreign. He was very tall, taller than most men Tobirama had come across, perhaps the height of Jiraiya. At a distance he could probably pass as a bastard Uchiha, his skin was certainly pale enough, and he had their brand of dark wavy hair. However, his facial features, his nose and the shape of his eyes were extremely unfamiliar; foreign.

Similar to Eru’s but not matching enough for Tobirama to say they were related.

Of course, who knew Eru’s true origins and history. Tobirama could guess, could make conjectures, but ultimately having never been to England or heard of it before Eru had arrived he had no idea.

As if on cue Hiruzen’s head of T&I, a man Tobirama wasn’t immediately familiar with, entered the other room along with the head of the Yamanaka clan. The door to their own room opened and Jiraiya shuffled in along with Orochimaru, which really was far too many people for the room but was par for the course when it came to something like this.

Also par for the course in events involving Eru Lee was the exhausted and apprehensive expression on Jiraiya’s face as he looked through the window.

“Is Hiruzen coming?” Tobirama asked.

“No, sensei’s opted just to read the report on this one. Figures if he has you, Mito, me, Oro, and T&I here someone will turn in something halfway decent.” Jiraiya said, rubbing a hand through his hair absentmindedly, “Course, since it’s Lee, that probably won’t be true. I mean, none of us are going to turn in a half-way decent report.”

“Your student isn’t even here.” Mito commented which just caused Jiraiya to bark out a scoffing laugh.

“My last mission report was about regenerating plant zombies trying to assassinate my student. Which, by the way, isn’t even getting into my last mess of a report which I had to do twenty-four hours later.” Jiraiya eyed Mito with something akin to pity, “Just because Lee-chan isn’t here doesn’t mean that this isn’t going to get Lee-ified.”

Tobirama felt that the report he’d had to hand in earlier, about the chakra inside of Lee’s head, was infinitely worse, but he had enough self-control not to say it. However, that said, he didn’t have the self-control to refrain from saying, “Don’t make a word out of your genin student.”

“Look, I’m her sensei, I need a short word to describe the ridiculous chaos that happens because of her. It’ll save me ten pages on every report.”

It wouldn’t save him ten pages on this report if Tobirama had anything to do with it.

It was also at this point that Tobirama realized Orochimaru was being unusually silent. The man didn’t chatter, especially not when working, but whenever Tobirama had seen him around Jiraiya he usually resorted to calling the man an idiot by this point.

Sparing the man a glance, Tobirama found himself doing a double-take, staring dumbfounded at the man’s glassy gaze and lack of emotion. There was none of his usual focus or contempt or any sort of expression on his face, just emptiness. Not only that but his hair looked as if it hadn’t been combed and his clothing as if it had been worn for days.

Jiraiya caught him staring, winced, and explained with a grimace, “Oh, yeah, Oro… He’s just… He’ll be better soon.”

Tobirama wasn’t Orochimaru’s number one supporter but even he found himself concerned by how out of character the man was acting.

“He’s been Lee-ified.” Jiraiya explained, apparently feeling the silence was long enough that another completely inadequate explanation was necessary.

Tobirama would never admit it but that word was very fitting and did satisfy most of his need for an explanation. Because if that was going to become a legitimate word then he’d have to start using words like Madara-ified or Hashirama-ified and there were simply some lines you did not cross.

Before anyone could say anything else, or Mito could ask precisely what Eru Lee had done to the snake sannin, the foreign nin in the other room finally lifted his head and slowly straightened himself as he took stock of his surroundings. Pale blue eyes roved over the two men in front of him, then behind them to the one-way mirror.

For a moment he just blinked, stared, his face giving away nothing then he opened his mouth and spoke… gibberish.

“Oh, shit.” Jiraiya concluded slowly, “He only speaks _English_.”

And though nobody had proved this yet, though the man could simply be pretending and hedging his bets, all Tobirama could think and all that came out of his mouth was, “Goddammit!”

* * *

It was a nice day, one of those pleasant summer days where the clouds rolled through the pure blue sky and the sun stayed shining, a perfect day to be outside training or even completing a D-rank.

It would have been nice, maybe he could have even watched the clouds with Shikaku, but it wasn’t going to be that kind of a day. At least, not until Lee was finally released from the hospital.

A week had been out of spite and at first he’d more or less agreed with it, because waking up from exhausted sleep to find that Lee had lit the Forest of Death on fire and poisoned herself, watching her die, had rattled him enough that condemning her to a week of observation in the hospital hadn’t seemed like nearly enough.

He’d never felt like her babysitter before, like he was the only thing holding her back from destroying everything, and he didn’t like feeling responsible for that.

Like if he wasn’t there she’d… implode.

Of course, it wasn’t quite that simple. Because after a few days, after he’d calmed down enough to actually be able to talk to her without screaming, he’d remembered that sometimes Lee was capable of being subtle.

Most people only saw her extravagance, her obtuseness and stubborn insistency that she was right, they didn’t see everything underneath that. There were so many layers to her, layers beneath layers, and there were times even Minato didn’t know quite what she was thinking.

Minato didn’t know much about her early childhood, before she’d come to Konoha, a lot of the time it hadn’t seemed to matter. After all, she’d only really lived there four years, and she’d even admitted that she hadn’t seen or done much during that time. But then, he’d begun to wonder, as he watched her wolf down ramen in the hospital bed, just how much of Lee had been carved out by that time in her home country.

Lee had learned at a very early age, before she’d come to Konoha, that people didn’t care what she thought, what she did, what she felt, what she said, and that she should only give what they expected of her and that she should expect nothing in return.

Or, at least, that’s what it seemed like to Minato, watching from the outside as she tried to give the academy senseis exactly what they wanted and nothing more. Nothing real. Chunin, she’d complain at the time, never asked you for what they actually wanted, made it this convoluted game that Lee had no hope of winning. And he’d always wondered why she thought it was a game she had to play and one she was doomed to lose.

It’d taken years for Lee to truly accept that she could talk to other people besides Minato and not until Jiraiya had become their sensei had she accepted that other people could care. Until that point people like Shikaku, Inoichi, Chozu, and Kushina were just strange curiosities who felt obligated to pay Lee attention which she felt grudgingly obligated to return.

Lee had told Minato, when she’d arrived, that she believed the world was a great nonsensical illusion that defied all reason and that she didn’t believe in putting on a show for it.

It was easy to forget that these weren’t quirks, that they weren’t just some cute tick of her personality, that there were probably deep and dark reasons behind them that Minato could only guess at.

Lee was capable of being uncertain, of being afraid, and somewhere along the way he’d almost forgotten that.

“Minato, you are the greatest human being to have ever existed.” Lee raved between bites of take-out ramen, effectively distracting Minato from his thoughts.

He felt his cheeks heat slightly, more than a little awkward at how easily and certainly she said that, and managed to get out, “Really, Lee, anyone could have gotten you ramen.”

She blinked at him and pointed out, “But no one ever does besides you.”

He blinked, he’d never really thought of that, but as far as he could remember it was actually true, “Well, but they could, I mean if they thought about it. It’s not that hard to get someone ramen.”

Lee just raised her eyebrows and continued to slurp broth, apparently deciding that wasn’t even worthy of a derisive comment. It probably wasn’t but he still felt he had to point it out, anyone could have gotten her ramen. If Minato had been paying attention, then he probably wouldn’t have needed to bring her ramen to the hospital in the first place.

“So, how long are you stuck in the hospital now?” Minato asked and Lee just threw her hands into the air and shook her head in dismay.

“I don’t know. Apparently I have to see Uzumaki’s aunt or something, and she’s apparently busy right now so… Who knows?” She sighed, glanced at the door and then back to Minato, “What are the chances that Tsunade will be fooled by a clone?”

“Low.” Minato said, almost without thinking, but it was true. If Lee was this wary of Tsunade then she must be very good.

Then he paused, rubbed a hand over his face and thought of the day’s events. It felt like he’d lived three days in one he was so tired. He couldn’t imagine how Lee felt, although, looking at her it seemed like she’d had a worse time of it than him. Having a soul sucked out of your head had to be more painful than sprinting to Jiraiya’s, digging through his sensei’s porn that he didn’t need to see, sprinting back, then sprinting for the second ramen run of the day. He still felt tired though.

“So, they managed to get it out then?” He asked.

“Apparently, although it’s painful as hell.” Lee groused, then moved her hair away from her face, “I also have a new seal out of all of this, what does it look like?”

Minato peered at her forehead, the old lightning bolt was still there, but had been covered by several different seals that Minato (who had only just started working on fuinjutsu) couldn’t recognize.

“Well, um, I suppose sort of like a thunderstorm.” The curves and swirls in the blue ink could resemble dark clouds with a single bolt of lightning striking down; if you squinted.

She let her hair fall back into place, covering the scar and seal, and a pensive expression crossed her face, “Huh, interesting.”

He just kept staring at her wondering exactly what was running through her head. She didn’t seem disturbed, she didn’t seem fine either, but she didn’t seem two seconds away from poisoning herself to build immunity or else test the waters again either.

Still, he had to ask, “Lee, are you alright?”

“I’m in a hospital and everything hurts.” Lee responded blandly, and he winced because really he should have expected that but…

“That’s not really what I meant.”

She stopped eating the ramen, set it aside on her table and eyed him for a moment, finally she said, “Sitting here in this hospital, having men’s souls pulled from my brain, I think I’ve learned something important. Nothing’s really changed Minato, the universe still doesn’t make much sense, you still bring me ramen multiple times a day, I’m still… me. I’ll get over it, I don’t really have a choice.”

He smiled weakly at that, twiddling his thumbs, and then commented, “You never really told me what he was like, your father I mean.”

She stared past him, her green eyes focused on the memory of a world beyond death, and when spoke it was slowly and uncertainly, “Old, terribly old, and sad… He said he’d forgotten there were such beautiful things in the world as… I don’t know, it was like he’d seen everything, and didn’t look away from it but… but that he still cared.”

She paused then, refocused on Minato, “He looks like me. I mean, he has my eyes, my nose and things… His hair’s a bit like an Uchiha’s though, like crow’s feathers, I wonder if they aren’t related to him too, or he is to them somehow.”

Minato took that in, not sure what to think about that Uchiha part, and then asked the other question that had been haunting him after the anger had finally faded, “Lee, why did you really poison yourself?”

She smiled at him grimly, understanding that he was the only one who would have asked that, who would have looked underneath that excuse of immunity and seen something beneath it, “I needed to talk to him.”

“About what?”

She looked at him for a moment, assessing, evaluating the costs and benefits of telling him then just shook her head, “It’s not really important.”

It was important to him.

But that didn’t seem to enough, instead she just continued talking about how sore she was, scheming ways to sneak out of the hospital without Tsunade hot on her trail, talking like nothing had really changed.

It hadn’t, but it also had, it should have at least.

He didn’t know how to say that though, and before he could even think how to try the door opened to reveal an awkwardly grinning Jiraiya, “Hey squirts, long time no see… Minato-kun, I’m gonna need you to come with me for a field trip.”

“A field trip?” Minato asked, eyebrows lifting, because as far as he knew it was their day off.

“Yeah, last minute thing… It’ll be fine, and fun, fine and fun.” Jiraiya said, but in that terribly awkward way that meant he was lying his ass off.

As if to confirm that Lee noted, “I suspect, Minato, that it will be neither fine nor fun.”

* * *

“Alright, so we’ve got two options.” Jiraiya announced to the four of them, still sitting staring dull eyed at the interrogation room after it had been confirmed that the man really didn’t speak English. More, the man apparently the man had a technique that blocked the Yamanaka mind reading technique, and had no inclination to stop using it.

Also not helping was the man clearly had no desire to cooperate, had made it a point to be uncooperative, and that made Tobirama more than a little uneasy. He didn’t like making needless enemies but he also didn’t like disregarding the security of the village. Hashirama was the idealist, never him, he could never quite bring himself to believe in the fundamental goodness of mankind.

This was a man who would place a seal onto a child, onto an infant, and destroy every remnant of her in order to steal her body and gain immortality. No matter his reasons, no matter his history or background, Tobirama believed that there were some lines reasonable men would not cross.

There were reasons, after all, that Tobirama had forbidden several of his own techniques.

So perhaps this was a man that Konoha could never truly trust, but certainly this interview, the actions they took against him here, would not endear the man to the village.

Regardless, before they even reached that point, they had to solve the inconvenient problem of language barriers and surpassing them.

On the table in front of them, where they had kept all of their notes, and attempted to see if any of them through exposure to Lee had managed to grasp enough of her language to be passable in it, Jiraiya had placed a paper with two names very familiar names written on it at the top.

“We’ve got Lee and we’ve got Minato.” Jiraiya said, underlining the characters of each name, then, “Alright people, pros and cons.”

“Eru Lee cannot intelligibly translate our own language let alone one we don’t understand.” Tobirama spat out, still seething over the fact that he had seen this coming well over a month ago and now they were screwed because no one had done anything about it.

Jiraiya dutifully wrote ‘unreliable translator’ under the ‘con’ list on Lee’s side of the paper, “That is a definite con for Lee-chan.”

“Both are untrained for interrogation.” Mito put in, a hand over her forehead, probably still ruing the fact that she’d been ‘brought in for this bullshit’.

“Yeah, but we’re a little slim on options here if you haven’t noticed.” Jiraiya cut in but added, “If we’re asking my opinion Lee might actually be a little better. She’s intimidating as hell and rarely gets flustered even under the threat of death.”

Jiraiya put ‘intimidating’ down under Lee’s ‘pro’ list.

“Namikaze, at least, is sane.” Tobirama snapped.

“Hey, Lee’s not insane she’s just… I think her worldview makes sense given the fact that she is kind of impossibly powerful.” Jiraiya said and then added, “I’m not putting that down on the list.”

“This man has a history with Eru Lee; at the moment he doesn’t know we have her or if she’s nearby. It wouldn’t be a good idea to dangle her like bait right in front of his nose when we don’t know what we’re dealing with.” Mito pointed out and Jiraiya nodded slowly, writing ‘mysterious past’ on Lee’s con side of the list.

“Right, that is a problem.”

And finally, seeming to have enough of this farce, Orochimaru spoke for the first time since entering the room. His voice was quiet but it was the sound of a man on the verge of snapping and destroying everything he’d ever loved, “If you bring Eru Lee in here, and I see her face, I will cut her into pieces and feed her to Manda.”

Jiraiya paused, turned to his teammate with a rather hesitant expression on his face, and for a moment looked torn between being concerned and horrified. Finally, he slowly noted, “Uh, Oro, you can’t… You can’t do that.”

“Why? She’ll just rise from the dead again. As she apparently always will.”

That did not make what he’d said any less vile, but none of them appeared to be in the mood to point that out. Tobirama would be sure to point out to Hiruzen that his student needed immense amounts of therapy, and probably shouldn’t be allowed near children.

“Right, okay, I guess that is a major con for bringing in Lee-chan.” Jiraiya leaned back and looked at his list as if he couldn’t quite believe he’d written it, “Looks like we’re bringing in Minato-kun.”

* * *

The last thing he truly remembered, that was clear and certain in his mind, was the moment he pointed his wand at the infant Potter’s head. He remembered her mother’s corpse rapidly cooling at his feet, the steadiness of his own hand, and the girl’s green eyes staring up at him as if they could see through to his very soul.

Then…

Then there was fire, burning, the sound of something shredding, pain everywhere and…

And then being jolted awake in a small, plain room, strapped to a chair with his hands cuffed on a table, and two men staring at him and speaking in a language he did not recognize. Men he almost mistook for muggles, given the style of their clothing and the room, the very way they sat and regarded him, and of course the black mirror at the end of the room which no doubt contained other prying eyes.

The ministry didn’t have men like this, at least, not to spare. These men took their jobs seriously, had an air of experience and power to them that seemed seeped into their very bones, where they could look at him with ease without a wand anywhere near their hands. The dubbed Madeye Moody was the only one he could think of fitting in at this table, and he was nowhere in sight.

However, just because they looked like muggles didn’t make them muggles either, evidenced by the blonde’s rather expert attempt at legillimancy.

As they talked to one another, seemed to conclude that he couldn’t understand them nor they him, he took stock of his surroundings and tried to get his thoughts in order.

The most important thing, aside from reacting to anything that happened here and now, was understanding what had led him to this moment.

His attack on the Potters had failed, had failed and he didn’t understand why, because he should have killed the girl and… Something happened, the spell backfired or… Something unnatural occurred.

(Prophecies, his mind whispered traitorously, have a nasty habit of coming true in ways you least expect. He’d chosen the wrong child, in spite of the gender he’d chosen the wrong one…)

Then, then he’d found himself in this place. His captors had a foreign, Asian look to them, almost. One was as blonde and blue eyed as any Swede but the shape of his features was unmistakably oriental.

Their clothing seemed almost militaristic. Not the pomp and circumstance military of the muggle 19th century, but instead dark and drab colors without medals, only a metal plate on each of their foreheads with a symbol of a leaf etched in.

It wasn’t an emblem that he recognized.

They spoke something that sounded like Japanese, and he wasn’t an expert, but he would have expected a familiar phrase or word to make an appearance but as of yet there was nothing familiar in how they spoke.

Perhaps far more damning and worrying was that he couldn’t spot a wand on either of them. Magic, yes, but not a single wand within reach.

In short: he had no idea where he was, what year it was even, no idea the status of the Death Eaters or the Potter girl for that matter, or even if these men truly knew who he was.

They didn’t look as if they recognized him, but then they were foreign, perhaps to them Voldemort was little more than a British inconvenience (and how that did burn at him, that he had worked so long and progressed so little). It would explain, after all, why he appeared to now be incarcerated. Even the most dystopic of regimes would have some reason for incarcerating him, whatever it might be.

They sat in silence and he stared at his own reflection in the mirror, bound to a muggle chair, his eyes burning back at him.

“This is humiliating.” His eyes told him, accused him, as if he was one of his own sniveling yes-men who had failed the simplest of tasks. As if he was Peter Pettigrew, begging on his hands and knees for forgiveness and mercy, willing to sacrifice his best friend for his own worthless skin.

(He had never really believed in friendship and Peter Pettigrew had confirmed every single one of his convictions regarding the topic.)

“You have failed,” They continued, burning and cruel and so very cold, “Failed in the most pathetic way imaginable.”

He felt his lips curl into a sneer and the mental dialogue continued, “You built yourself from nothing, murdered your father and your past, converted the aristocracy that despised everything you are into sycophants, almost took a nation and you were destroyed by an infant. By your own hubris.”

Then, “Are you proud, Tom?”

(He’d always loathed that name.)

The door opened, he felt the jagged wolfish grin fade from his lips, shift into something neutral and far saner, and turned his head to regard the child that walked in.

A child, no more than thirteen. A boy with lemon blonde hair sticking out almost adorably from beneath his own headband, large pale blue eyes, and a look of determination on his features which seemed so out of place with the baby fat still clinging to his cheeks.

They sent in a child to interrogate him.

He felt his magic stirring, restless in his stomach, felt it attempting to flow upwards and out only to be met with sluggish resistance and a feeling of exhaustion. Something was stopping him from lighting the boy on fire, because if this had been a meeting among his Death Eaters then the boy would be on fire and screaming through his will alone. Something, he thought almost panicked, was damming his magic inside of his own body.

A seat was pulled out for him, the boy took it, rearranged himself and faced him.

And looking at the boy’s face he paused, and remembered looking at himself in a mirror, and having seen that same look on his own face years before. That look when he’d decided that he’d recreate England in his own image and make them bow to him; that he would transcend Tom Riddle as if he’d never existed in the first place.

The look of cold and ruthless determination.

One Tom had never seen on any other child’s face.

It still did not change the fact that this boy was only a boy. Or the fact that the boy was, apparently, a great fool or at the very least dangerously ignorant. The boy looked him dead in the eye, practically begging for him to read his mind. At least, he tried, but when he tried to focus his magic he again found himself sluggish and blocked and unable to peer into even the shallowest of surface thoughts.

They had somehow countered his legillimancy and he had no idea whether or not they knew it. (They must know it, but he’d never heard of someone being able to do this, or anyone wanting to. Because surely, surely this beyond even Azkaban, would be considered a monstrosity. It was one thing to snap a man’s wand, another thing to turn him into a muggle.)

While they stared at each other, sizing each other up, the darker haired man at the table spoke calmly, eyes narrowed towards him, and then when he had finished the boy began speaking.

“Do you know where you are?” It was heavily accented, not unintelligible, but unmistakably foreign, and with it he was able to understand exactly why they’d brought the poor boy in.

“You were the best they had to translate?” He asked, crowing, the boy’s eyes narrowed but otherwise gave no indication of the insult or even being intimidated.

The boy then stated, as if he hadn’t even been answered in the first place, “You are inside of Konohagakure, the Village Hidden in the Leaves. We’re here to ask you a few questions. If you are cooperative and are not a danger to the village you will be released and your stay within the village will be negotiated. If you are not, you will be here much longer than you like and your stay will be unpleasant, perhaps even lethal.”

Something in him burned, and again the magic in him almost seemed to boil with his rage, as he looked at this small blonde haired cherub telling him what he could and could not do.

The men behind the boy, though, did not wait for his answer (whether he agreed to their terms or would rather face the firing squad) but began speaking again leaving the boy to translate.

“Where are you from?’

He offered the boy a thin, patronizing, smile and said, “You were the best in your class, weren’t you? A little too eager, always with the right answer, the star pupil I’m sure… I think it’s adorable that they think I’ll find that remotely intimidating.”

The air gained a curious thick quality, the boy’s knuckles grew white as he gripped he laced his hands too tightly together, as the boy slowly but surely repeated back to his masters exactly what he had been told.

Then his head was ringing with the force of a blow he didn’t even manage to see.

Looking at the men, at the boy, it seemed as if none of them had even moved.

“You will answer the questions.” The boy said, translating again for the men, and then, “Where are you from?”

He eyed the boy, this boy who really was beginning to remind him of himself, and offered him a cold and unsympathetic smile, “No, boy, I don’t think I will.”

Another blow, his vision swam and body drooped, and it took a few seconds for his surroundings to reorganize themselves and for him to be able to lift his head and stare at his captors. There was blood, he noted absently, dripping from his nose.

“Where are you from?” The boy repeated.

He wondered if they’d go so far as to kill him, he wondered if he’d go so far as to bring them to it, he eyed them and then turned his expression to the mirror again. He wouldn’t win against the men behind the mirror, the true puppet masters, unless he played at least part of the game.

If he didn’t answer some of the questions, then he would never return to England and take what was rightfully his.

He straightened, stared the boy in the eye, and said, “I am from Great Britain.”

The boy stared at him for a moment, repeated what he had said in the other language, then asked, “Are you familiar with the land of England?”

Well, he thought to himself with an almost sinking desperate feeling, it seemed he was very far from home, “England is a nation within Great Britain, I was born in England.”

“What is your name?”

Ah, the name, he paused and saw the men twitch (probably a warning to him that he would be hit again if he refused to answer), licking the blood from his lips he said, “I am known as Lord Voldemort.”

There was no hint of recognition in their faces, he felt himself grow colder, his subconscious thoughts more desperate.

“That is not your true name then,” The boy inferred, and he just smiled at the boy, a cold thing.

“It’s not the one I was born with, and of no real importance. However, you’ll kill me before you ever hear it from my lips.” He would not be recorded and killed by these men as Tom Marvolo Riddle.

The boy looked as if he wanted to press this and he began to suspect that this was more than an interrogation for this boy, it was personal, despite his lack of familiarity with Voldemort there was something about his circumstances that the boy was familiar with and had been deeply angered by.

(It was the look, he reflected, of a man whose wife or loved one had been threatened, not slaughtered, but threatened. Who was just on the edge of doing something very irrational and stupid out of fear and anger.)

There was a pause after the foreign question, a longer one where the boy looked as if he was trying to peer through to his soul, and then, “Were you a _shinobi_?”

He blinked, then honestly admitted, “I am unfamiliar with that word.”

The boy repeated this back to his supervisors, then, “Do you manipulate _chakra_?”

“I am also unfamiliar with that word.”

The boy repeated his answer then didn’t wait for them to ask a question, continued, “It’s energy within you, civilians often think it’s magic.”

He felt his eyebrows raise dubiously, “You mean magic. You’re asking me if I can use magic?”

The boy repeated this, cringing as he did so, as if it was physically painful for him to say these words. Then there was a long bickering discussion, the boy motioning to him and explaining something, and the men looking dubious.

Then, “Yes, I am asking if you can use magic.”

For a single, bizarre moment, he was thrown back to his childhood. Tom Riddle, sitting in a church pew, staring dull eyed at the preacher knowing with absolute certainty that god, and hell for that matter, didn’t exist.

He had looked up at that man and thought he was so unbelievably stupid, to think shouting at a ceiling was going to change anything about his circumstances, and he had thought that he had figured everything out.

And for a moment, staring at this boy, Tom Riddle wondered if he wasn’t in hell.

He was strapped to a chair, unable to access his magic, being asked if he was a wizard, and had possibly died trying to murder a defenseless infant. And he had only the strange, haunting, thought that he had somehow found his way into muggle hell.

He said the only thing he could, softly, without inflection and none of the eerie madness that was overtaking him, “Yes, I have magic, I am a wizard.”

“A wizard?” The boy repeated, dully, with raised eyebrows.

“Yes, a wizard.”

The boy just looked at him, as dubiously as Tom Riddle had once looked at a drunken Mrs. Cole preaching the gospels, and turned back to the men repeating it. Then they had another very long discussion, the boy explaining again and the men looking more incredulous by the moment.

For his own part, he merely stared over their shoulders, into the mirror at his own miserable reflection. And he thought, that yes, until another more sensible explanation came into place he was going to assume that James Potter had somehow managed to kill him and that he was in fact in hell.

Humiliating, dehumanizing, hell.

* * *

Minato and Jiraiya, surprisingly, weren’t Lee’s last visitors of the day.

The sun was almost setting outside and through the window the faces of the hokages on the mountain became shrouded in darkness and their features indistinguishable from one another. Lee watched with a tired sort of feeling, wondering if she’d feel more energetic when she was finally released from this place, whenever that might be.

That was when the man walked in.

He was old, sandaime old, and from the way he walked he at least thought he was fairly important. He also thought he was menacing, shadows seeming to leak from him with every step he took into the room, his footsteps echoing against the laminated floor as he took the seat that Minato had previously occupied.

Then he simply stared at her, dark eyes assessing, shifting into a comfortable position beneath bandages and robes.

“Visiting hours are over, you know.” Lee pointed out, but the man didn’t seem to mind, or even appear slightly concerned over the possible wrath of Senju Tsunade.

“Do you know who I am, Eru Lee?” He asked instead of answering why he felt he was above the sacred laws of visiting hours (which Minato himself was not even allowed to break).

The answer, ‘a very old man’ would probably not get her far, and probably wouldn’t get him out of her room, in spite of being accurate. Still, it’d been a long day, and a man had just been ripped out of her brain, and she really wasn’t in the mood for anymore weirdness in the form of old men making her offers she couldn’t refuse.

So instead she just settled for a flat, unamused, “No.”

The man seemed to find this cute, if disappointing, and sneered at her, “Well, you are young. My name is Danzo Shimura, and I am member of Konoha’s council.”

“Great.” Lee responded, just as flatly, which caused Danzo’s patronizing amused expression to slip and one of insulted irritation to take its place.

“Do you understand what that means, Eru-san?”

“It means you’re on the village council.” Lee parroted, which caused the insulted irritation to be replaced by something much darker, a low dangerous sort of fury.

But then, in a moment, the oppressive feeling was gone and he was just looking at her patronizingly again, “Ah, you have quite the sense of humor, Eru-san. It means that I have power, and that I am in a position to help talented individuals like yourself.”

Lee was getting more unimpressed by the second and was in no mood to hide it from mysterious, and frankly creepy, old men, “I also have great power.”

“Yes, you do,” The man said, and then asked, “Tell me, Lee, where do you see yourself in a year.”

Lee blinked, thought about it, and answered, “Probably at Ichiraku’s counter.”

The air in the room became suffocating, killer intent leaking off of the man in waves, “That was not what I meant.”

“Oh,” Lee said before adding, “That’s great.”

The man appeared to think this was anything but great, but really, if he just got to the point then they would all be a lot happier. Or, at the very least, he could get to the point and make his offer with her. At least, she assumed that was why he was here, unless he really was just asking strange irrelevant questions for no reason. That could be possible, the universe seemed very erratic recently, must be something about hospitals.

“I meant as a shinobi, where do you see yourself in your career?”

Lee thought about it again, still unimpressed, and replied, “Bringing honor and glory to the village, probably.”

This apparently was also not the right answer. It was also starting to feel a bit like an academy oral exam which Lee was failing. She was almost tempted to blurt ‘the will of fire’ if only to get the man to calm down and leave her alone. Really, if they wanted a certain response why did they even bother to ask her? They could just answer it themselves.

“There is no doubt, Eru-san, that you will pass the chunin exams in a few months. However, when you do. All paths are open to you.” The man said rather tightly and then leaned in far too close for Lee’s comfort, “However, some paths are more beneficial than others, aren’t they Lee?”

She couldn’t help but shudder when he said her first name, like she was supposed to know or like him or something.

This apparently was rhetorical, which was nice because she probably wouldn’t have had the right answer anyways, and the man continued with a sneer, “You could stay with your team after the exams, be held down by Matsuda Haru’s incompetence and Jiraiya’s softness. Or, you could instead join ANBU and swiftly rise through the ranks and reach your true potential.”

Now, there was a thought.

Lee had a lot of respect for ANBU and their almost crippling work ethic and ability to function while sleep deprived, poisoned, starved, and brainwashed. Lee also had a large amount of respect for Hatake Sakumo, her own personal window into the functioning of ANBU. They also conveniently did away with their names, so she wouldn’t have to remember anyone’s, just be able to guess which animal their mask was. And, truth be told, she’d never really thought about joining it herself…

Then again, on the other hand, she’d never really thought about joining it herself. She’d also never really thought about what being continually sleep deprived would cause her to do. She’d learned what being poisoned was like, and it was much less fun than it sounded and also caused things to light themselves on fire. If she didn’t want the village destroyed, and she didn’t, then perhaps joining ANBU wasn’t a great idea.

She also didn’t really know what ANBU nin did, just that they were secret ninja even among ninja, and that they always smelled like a disturbing amount of blood. What if they had to take blood baths, or something, Lee wasn’t quite sure she could handle literal blood baths.

Still, the only thing she was really hung up on was, “Who the hell is Haru?”

Danzo blinked, stared at her in complete shock, and after a moment of flabbergasted silence said, “One of your teammates, the boy with brown hair and…”

“Oh, you mean Dead Last.” Lee said, comprehension dawning, she’d sort of forgotten he’d had an actual name, and then putting two and two together she was in hysterics. She didn’t mind the aches and pain, just threw her head back and gasped for breaths in between her laughter.

Finally, when she could speak again, “Oh, you funny man. Oh no, I don’t think he’s going to hold me back.”

“What?”

She offered the man a conspiratorial grin, brushing tears from the edges of her eyes, bringing herself together so that she could provide some sort of an answer. 

“Well, I’ve come to realize a few things while sitting in this hospital waiting for sweet freedom. One, is that you should never make life altering decisions while significantly sleep deprived. Second, is that you kind of need a dead last on a team. I mean, you need a ninjutsu master and a taijutsu master, not to mention other specialties so you don’t get yourselves killed. But you also need that useless guy who says that maybe it isn’t a good idea to poison yourself while still reeling from meeting your father in another dimension after being stabbed.” Lee said cheerfully, actually feeling a bit better about having come to this conclusion herself, “Besides, even if Dead Last wanted to hold me back, he’s too useless to even think about stopping me.”

This, apparently, was the wrong answer also.

But it was apparently wrong enough to cause the man to storm out of the room after a sharp, “Think about the mistakes your making in life!”, and slamming of her door.

Confused, tired, and not in the mood for this bullshit Lee was willing to call it a success even if she’d understood none of what had just happened.


	11. What is a Wizard?

_In which Lee decides that the universe has gone too far this time, Uchiha Mikoto has a rather large problem that she can’t explain to anyone, and Minato doesn’t know what to make of the English ninja._

* * *

“Minato, I think the universe has given up.”

Instead of greeting sweet freedom with the jubilation it deserved Lee found herself staring blankly out into the streets of Konoha outside of the hospital. Eyes landing on this and that pedestrian, taking in the streaming sunlight, and all in all feeling perhaps more out of it than she should have.

No longer like she’d been run over by a stampede of rabid Uchiha fangirls, but still, more flabbergasted than she would have liked.

Minato didn’t ask her why she was so certain, just kept in pace with her as they walked along, his own face stuffed in Lee’s handwritten “The Fellowship of the Ring” looking a little too intense for a stroll through the village.

In spite of Minato’s lack of attention Lee continued her explanation anyways, “More important, I think I’ve given up too.”

Because, after too many days in the hospital, Lee had been forced to draw no other conclusion but nothing made sense and nothing even tried to. Ever. Especially in hospitals. And if no one else was going to notice, then Lee might as well stop pointing it out.

Because she really just couldn’t handle it anymore.

* * *

Outside of the window the sun was setting, casting long shadows over the carved faces of the hokages on the mountainside, and as he watched the disappearing rays Mianto couldn’t help but think that visiting hours had ended and that whatever chance Minato might have to speak with Lee that day was long gone.

And he still wasn’t done with Jiraiya’s impromptu ‘field trip’ to T&I, even if he was out of the interrogation room, even if he was no longer staring into the face of that English jonin… The wizard.

They were inside of the Senju compound, laced with fuinjutsu drawn by Senju Tobirama and Uzumaki Mito years and years ago perhaps when Konoha itself was founded, such that this place might almost be considered as private and secretive as the hokage tower itself.

Fuinjutsu, Minato had always had an interest in fuinjutsu. It’d always been there, at the edge of a chapter in an academy textbook, a mention in conversation, just out of reach but enough to tantalize with possibility. Jiraiya had even said, mentioned casually, that as the chunin exams approached he might very well start Minato on the basics. But as of yet he had no real introduction to the discipline and no real understanding of it.

He’d started seeing it everywhere though, ever since Lee’s strange scar had stopped being a scar at all, and had turned out to be something far more dangerous.

And here he was now, standing in front of the seated elite of the village, not only his sensei or Orochimaru, but the nidaime, Uzumaki Mito, and even the shodaime himself (who seemed to have invited himself to their meeting) all looking at him and asking for his expert opinion on England and what this all meant.

What that man had meant.

(They should have picked Lee, Lee would have known what he meant, Lee would have…)

“Alright, Minato-kun, let’s hear your thoughts.”

Minato swallowed, his eyes darted to the books he’d hastily grabbed from his and Lee’s apartment on his way back from T&I, all written in Lee’s English scrawl with varying titles that had all seemed somewhat relevant or if they hadn’t seemed relevant then at least…

“Aren’t they… Shouldn’t you discuss this with interrogation first?” Minato asked, in response receiving raised eyebrows from the nidaime, as if wondering why Minato would ever ask something like that.

“Don’t worry about them, they have their own observations, and they’ll come up with their own questions.” Jiraiya said, then motioned to himself and the others, “But if we’re going to come up with decent questions, things we need to know about his history and techniques, then we have to know what the hell he said.”

It was unspoken that the transcripts themselves weren’t enough. Because it had become clear, once the man had decided to cooperate, had given the illusion of cooperation, that the language barrier was larger than they had expected.

That perhaps there weren’t clear translations for words that should have been intuitive. Things like shinobi or even chakra itself. It wasn’t a direct mapping, not something easy, and Minato couldn’t help but wonder if he’d asked the wrong questions, if he’d gained the wrong understanding, if the man hadn’t said what Minato so very clearly thought he had said.

“Do you want my thoughts or…” Minato asked, uncertainly, feeling very much like the green genin he was.

“Let’s start with definitions.” The nidaime said, scratching down words every now and then as he stared at Minato with undivided attention, “There were some words that you hesitated to translate.”

Strange, though, was how appalled the man had seemed by Minato needing even to ask for clarification. As if asking him if he manipulated chakra, was capable of this, was the gravest insult Minato could ever offer him. After that, after that he’d been… Distant, preoccupied, they hadn’t gotten very far after that.

“He calls chakra, _magic_ , I think.” Minato paused, breathed out, picked up one of the books, Lee’s painstakingly written “ _The Hobbit_ ” and flipped through the pages and illustrations of dwarves, hobbits, and of course the wizard Gandalf.

“If I translate that directly from _English_ then he used the word magic.”

He almost instinctively cringed, waiting for at least Orochimaru to give some scathing remark, but Orochimaru barely seemed invested at all. As for the others, they didn’t interrupt, but they did give him something of a doubtful look.

“Magic? Like, what?” Jiraiya asked, a small frown growing on his face.

This was where it became complicated, where Minato had felt his own confidence in interrogating begin to slide away, where he’d begun to doubt what he himself was hearing and relaying back not only what he’d heard but also what it meant.

“Like something a shaman might use, a witch, or a sorcerer… Or, what civilians think we use, if they are unfamiliar with the mechanics of chakra.” Minato finally settled on with a sigh.

“Why do you think this word isn’t simply directly translatable to chakra? Why as magic instead?”

“When Lee uses the word _magic_ , she never uses it in the context of chakra, and she’s never tried to either. _Magic_ is a lighter word a… Less defined word, than chakra, it’s the word you use when there’s no understanding of a discipline. When things work like… well, magic.” Minato said, his hands gesturing as he tried to grasp the way Lee so instinctively knew English, the right words to say and the wrong ones, and why chakra and magic felt like such inherently different concepts.

“Lee said people in _England_ don’t have chakra, or at least, not noticeable malleable levels of chakra. They don’t have words for that sort of a concept, at least, none that she’s told me.” Minato sighed then, rubbed the back of his head, continuing on, “That said… I really do think he meant chakra, even with that word. He… He just views it differently than we do.”

He might not call himself a shinobi, might not call it chakra and talk about gates or reserves, but all the same there was killing intent all around him and he’d had the eyes of a ninja not to be trifled with. Even with different words, strange words to use, even then he was something dangerous.

It didn’t change what he’d done to Lee, no matter what he called himself.

With a breath Minato steeled himself and continued, looking at each of them as he did so, “He called himself a _wizard_ which I’m choosing to believe he’s using as shinobi. However, that said, the _English_ word _wizard_ has very different connotations than shinobi or ninja.”

Here Minato held up the book, opened it to reveal one of Lee’s sketches of Gandalf the Grey, “A _wizard_ is something like a sage, usually a very old and learned man, who has spent much of his existence studying the mysteries of _magic_ , of chakra if you’re stretching definitions. _Wizards_ aren’t typically warriors, they excel in ninjutsu, genjutsu, maybe fuinjutsu, and perhaps even senjutsu but have little patience for taijutsu or kenjutsu. They… advise, they guide, they provide support but they typically don’t… lead. They also don’t… They don’t tend to hold themselves accountable to any particular daimyo.”

Minato then passed the book to the shodaime, who opened it curiously and flipped through all of the pictures, even as Minato kept talking.

“Of course, these are stereotypes from Lee, but all the same there are usually these connotations or stereotypes for a reason… I expect, that when he says _wizard_ , he really doesn’t completely mean shinobi. Even if we both have the ability to manipulate chakra and perform ninjutsu.”

“Is this book written in _English_?” Hashirama asked, eyes lit up as he flipped through, perhaps more engaged with that than what Minato himself had said. Not that he was alone, everyone else’s eyes drifted too, curiously to perhaps the largest amount of English they’d ever seen printed.

“Yeah, Lee wrote it, it’s… It’s a book that was published in _England_.”

Before the academy, and really into those early academy days, Lee had feverishly written many legends and tales from her home country. Minato hadn’t read most of them, had really only touched a couple, but they still lined one of the bookshelves in their apartment, just above the basic texts from their days in the academy. 

These days even Lee treated them more like an afterthought than anything of true importance.

“The characters, they keep repeating, it’s so odd… Tobi, you never mentioned this.” Hashirama pointed out as he flipped through the pages.

“I’ve never seen it written before.” Tobirama grumbled, looking clearly put out by that fact. Which, well, Minato would have written some if Tobirama had wanted samples. Not that Minato’s calligraphy in English was anything to write home about, Lee’s was far more legible, but all the same the nidaime had never asked him for that.

“Is it phonetic then?” Now Mito was peering over at the book, tracing the characters with sharp eyes.

“Possibly, it seems unlikely that there would be so many repeated words otherwise.” Tobirama mused, “Of course, this all would have been more convenient if I actually knew the answer to that question before we had a fuinjutsu master on our doorstep.”

Minato wondered, as he watched them discuss, if he shouldn’t have convinced Lee to translate the books or at least done it himself, because as it was they were getting very off topic. Suddenly this wasn’t about the nin, wasn’t about the man, but instead the language and culture of a place none of them had ever even been to.

“Well, too late for that.” Jiraiya scoffed, motioning to the book.

“Only if we continue to do nothing! If only for our own use an unknown language used for encryption would be…”

“Doesn’t help the fact that…”

And then they were all talking over each other, Tobirama about the need to institute a program to teach English to higher ranking ninja, Hashirama flipping through pages and noting the strange clothing, facial structures, and heights of the varying characters, Mito analyzing the language, and Jiraiya pointing out that any learning to be done really could only be done through Lee.

And Minato just stood there, thinking, that while it hadn’t gone to hell exactly it was clear from this alone that no one knew what they were doing or how to approach this.

This was… Well, unprecedented. Every country spoke the same language, everyone knew where everyone else came from, and even secluded distant islands weren’t so alien as this man or even Lee herself.

How could you interrogate someone who didn’t even understand you?

All at once he felt overwhelmed, growing smaller and smaller as the volume grew, and he wondered how exactly it was that they expected him to handle this. That they expected him, alone, out of all of the village to correctly interpret what this man, this Voldemort, said and somehow see underneath that to the underneath.

And this wasn’t even getting to the fact that he still hadn’t really talked to Lee about her father, her own history, her divinity and how she was handling that or any of this. This was only… Only the barest scratch on the surface of all that needed to be done.

And he wondered how it had landed so forcefully on his shoulders.

He interrupted, forcefully, almost without thinking, “The book is… it’s about _wizards_ , actually.”

They stopped talking, turned their attention back to him as he motioned towards the book.

“Well,” Minato paused, hesitated, then expanded, “Sort of. There is a _wizard_ in it, named Gandalf the Grey. He’s part of this small order of _wizards_ , a higher ranking member, and he helps Bilbo Baggins, a _hobbit_ on his quest to steal from a dragon.”

On seeing his audience’s rather alarmed expressions Minato realized that he had to clarify further, “Of course, this is all fiction!”

They paused, looked up at him, and Minato flushed suddenly feeling too much like Lee. Because Lee had always had to insist over and over that there were no shinobi in England. And now here he was, trying to explain a country he had never seen, only heard about, and confronted with that same problem.

That wizards weren’t real.

“ _Wizards_ aren’t… They’re folklore. Lee said that no one actually believes in _wizards_ , any more than they believe in dragons, or _jedi_ , they’re just… stories. Legends.”

For a moment none of them said anything, they just looked at each other, and finally the nidaime said, “I think it’s time to put aside whatever previous beliefs we had about what is and is not real in _England_.”

And perhaps that was for the best, perhaps that was true, perhaps Lee had been wrong (clearly Lee had been wrong) but all the same… Even never having been there himself, only knowing England through Lee, only having seen this blue-eyed English nin once, even then he hesitated to say that they were the same.

That a wizard was simply a shinobi, that magic was simply chakra, that Lee was simply wrong and that their world was so easily translated into that alien place that Lee had grown up in. And these simple words would twist their understanding of this man, this stranger, into something they were familiar with but something that wasn’t true.

Something he might use to his advantage if he caught on.

After all, if it had been Lee, if Lee had been sitting in front of him being interrogated, then she would have used the word jedi, if anything, rather than wizard.

* * *

Lee had thought that the mysterious Danzo, offering positions of power and sanctuary from dead lasts, would be the weirdest thing to happen to her in the hospital. After all, it had been somewhat random, and unprecedented.

Before that point she’d never even heard of Danzo and as the days wore on, and she tried and failed to convince Tsunade that she really didn’t need to be in a hospital, he failed to make any reappearance. Like he had been some mysterious godfather ghost. Except without the cat, and the oranges, and the decapitated horse’s head in her bed after she had so blatantly refused the offer she couldn’t refuse.

On second thought Danzo hadn’t really played the role of Vito Corleone that well.

So, in Lee’s own optimistic ignorance, she thought Danzo would probably be the week’s winner of reasons the universe was falling apart. He would have been the month’s if Lee hadn’t already been killed by plant zombies, met her extradimensional divine father, resurrected the dead, had a man pulled out of her brain, discovered her own immortality, and personally witnessed the immortality of the demon cat Tora.

Actually, in retrospect, a number of alarming things had happened to Lee since becoming a genin. Still, she had thought that surely, while she was stuck in the hospital not actually doing anything for fear of Tsunade’s clip boarded wrath, that nothing strange could happen. Or, at least, nothing to top Danzo.

Eru Lee was wrong; Eru Lee was very wrong.

Perhaps it started with Danzo, or rather the mysterious English not-shinobi who had been lodged in her brain, but it certainly didn’t end there. No, in fact, one might say that it was only the beginning.

The beginning of Lee catching on to all of this hospital based weirdness, though, started the day after Danzo’s mysterious appearance and then disappearance into the night from whence he came. Or, more accurately, it started when Minato didn’t show up but Uzumaki’s Uchiha side kick did.

If Uzumaki Kushina was Batman then it might easily be said that Uchiha Mikoto was Robin. Other than that, Lee wasn’t sure she had too much of an opinion for or against Mikoto. Truth was, outside of being the Uchiha who always hung around Kushina they didn’t talk too much. Especially considering that Lee had skipped pretty much every kunoichi lecture that had ever been given at the academy.

(Despite receiving numerous detentions and lectures from her normal academy sensei for doing this, as far as Lee could tell, being unable to arrange flowers had no detrimental effect on her kunoichi career thus far.)

Still, if Lee was to list people off the top of her head that she had some acquaintanceship with in the village Uchiha Mikoto would probably show up on it. Maybe far down on the list, past Minato, Jiraiya, the former hokages, Dead Last, Orochimaru, even Lazy Nara, but she would probably show up somewhere.

Uchiha Mikoto, sitting across from Lee’s hospital bed, looked more than uncomfortable. She also looked more than nervous. One might say that she looked downright paranoid, which for a ninja really was something.

For one thing, on entering the room, even after sitting down for five minutes she still hadn’t said anything. Instead she kept glancing at the doors and windows, sharingan flicking on and off and on again, like some defective traffic light. She also was paler than usual, but more than that, she looked… frazzled. Her hair was frizzing slightly, certainly not enough to garner concern in a normal person, but this was an Uchiha and they were in a constant battle with the Hyuga clan for the most impeccable looking clan in the village.

Point being Lee had never seen any Uchiha look as bad as Uchiha Mikoto did right at that moment.

“So, what brings you back to my humble hospital room?” Lee finally got around to asking, when she realized that Uchiha Mikoto apparently wasn’t going to say anything first, in spite of appearing without any real need to.

For a moment Mikoto just looked at her, looked through her, those red pinwheel eyes blazing far too brightly, like an electric glow from a neon sign was lit behind them. Lee couldn’t help but wonder if it was truly wise to stare something like that back in the face.

“…If you want me to say that I regret poisoning myself and lighting trees on fire in front of you, then I can do that.” Not that Lee wanted to, having gone through that repentance song and dance far too often for one week.

Mikoto grimaced, displeased, this clearly being the exact opposite of what she wanted.

“I… Do you know what you did?”

That sounded very rhetorical, so Lee was guessing the answer wasn’t hospitalizing herself, or somehow rising from the dead. That, and, a lot of what had happened to Lee was apparently an S-ranked secret making it very difficult for Lee to discuss what went on in her life.

“…I don’t know what I didn’t do.” Lee finally settled on, feeling that this was rather true, even if she was confused about all of this.

And Danzo, must not forget about Danzo.

“I don’t… You have to help me, this is your fault and… And everyone’s asking questions that I can’t answer!”

Funny, because Lee was pretty sure that Mikoto was asking Lee questions that Lee didn’t think she could answer. Mikoto however, seemed to think it was anything but hilarious.

Finally, Mikoto sighed and pointed to her now black, normal looking, eyes, “This… This is a clan secret, technically, but I really don’t see a way around it. I mean, I can’t tell them about your S-ranked secret but I can’t tell anyone else about the clan’s and… Something’s got to give, doesn’t it?!”

Lee didn’t know, but at least from the description it sounded like Mikoto’s last couple days had been about as much fun as Lee’s. Well, maybe Lee had a worse time, unless Mikoto talked about a man being pulled out of her brain Lee doubted hers could match.

Finally Mikoto said, with dead seriousness, still pointing to her eyes, “This is not a normal sharingan.”

“There are normal sharingans?” Lee asked, because as far as she knew they were all swirly eyed to some degree or another. Really, looking any Uchiha with a sharingan in the eye was… alarming, at best. It didn’t help that they could probably use their vision to make you explode.

Which, really, what an odd thing a dojutsu was. Why out of all the body parts would eyes have this mystical power? Why not the feet? Or the hands, Lee thought hands were very important yet the Hyuga and Uchiha both instead had strange eyeball powers.

Mikoto, however, wasn’t about to explain why she had eyeball powers but instead continued, “Yes, and when I saw you… die, when I had the shock of watching you die… I didn’t get a normal sharingan.”

This apparently was important, Lee had no idea why this was important, if Minato was here he would probably know why this was important and tell Lee so that she could at least appear sympathetic instead of just very confused.

“…Okay.”

“Not okay!” Mikoto said, slamming her hand on the table, a curiously violent action for someone who usually left the needless violence to Kushina.

“Alright, not okay…” Lee said, trailing off, still mostly confused, “How is this my problem?”

“This is your problem because you’re the reason I’m in this mess!” Mikoto said, leaning forward, and all at once she went from a rather pleasant looking girl to something quite intimidating, “There are only a few ways to gain the sharingan, Eru Lee. You gain the lowest form, your first form, through panic, adrenaline, suffering, trauma… But I didn’t get that form, Lee. I got the form that only Madara has achieved in recent memory, the form you get from killing your own brother!”

Lee had nothing really to say to that, except that it was very strange that her eyeball powers would only activate after killing your brother. If Lee had magical eyeball powers she felt she would have had them the whole time, and not after killing a brother, especially since Lee didn’t actually have any brothers… Unless Death had other extramarital affairs, which… She would have to ask him about that, that might be important.

Still, she was getting off track, and was still mostly confused.

“Oh.” Lee simply said, when it seemed like Mikoto was waiting for at least some response.

“Oh, Lee? Just oh? How about, oh shit!”

“Oh… shit?” Lee repeated, where was Minato to translate when you needed him, was he still on that field trip with Jiraiya? How long would that thing take, and where did they even go anyways?

“Because, Lee, no one in my family is dead and none of my friends are dead. So how can I possibly have the mangekyo sharingan if no one in the village has died?!” Mikoto slumped then, suddenly defeated, putting her head in her hands, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to explain this.”

“Oh… You want my advice?” Lee said, finally managing to clue in, sort of, not really.

“Just… Sure, Lee, let’s hear your advice.”

“Well…” Lee wasn’t entirely sure she understood the situation enough to give advice, but if she wanted Mikoto out of her room then she supposed she had to at least try.

So, going over what Mikoto had sort of explained, but not really. The sharingan wasn’t just biological but also psychological in that you couldn’t activate it unless you had a miserable life. Well, alright, that was a little weird but it wasn’t any weirder than anything else.

Lee could handle that.

Point two, Mikoto didn’t get this normal sharingan, she got the super special sharingan. Super special sharingan can only be caused by killing your own brother. Which, well, was a little weird and a little counterintuitive. After all, if everyone tried to get this special sharingan it would split the Uchiha population in half. But then, didn’t she say Madara was the last one to have it? Which, none of the text books had mentioned Madara killing off his own brother, they usually made some brief mention of the nidaime killing Izuna but… Well, it was Madara, that guy was kind of whacky.

Point being that having super special sharingan wasn’t really a good thing, was a bad thing, a problem, a problem that Lee was now supposed to solve.

Uchiha Mikoto had real problems that Lee didn’t feel like she should be at all concerned with.

This, clearly, was at the very least a Minato problem. Or, at least, it would be if Minato got his ass backed where it belonged and stopped frolicking around with Jiraiya on mysterious field trips.

“Tell them that… That you time travelled in the course of an afternoon, and you met Madara, and that you became attached to him because… Clan bond things, such that you looked up to him as an older brother, but then he and Hashirama have their ultimate showdown complete with giant fox. This makes you sad, Hashirama dying makes you even sadder, so you have no choice but to kill Madara yourself… Then you travel back to the future complete with your new special fratricide brand of sharingan.”  

That, apparently, wasn’t a good answer.

“Alright, nix that, how about you tell them that I died… but that I now am a zombie in Orochimaru’s zombie army which he will one day use to colonize the continent.”

Mikoto’s glare only increased in intensity, that new and improved sharingan flickering on once again. Also, wait, now that Lee was thinking about this why was this Lee’s fault. All Mikoto had done was watch Lee die a horrific fiery poisoned death, it wasn’t like Mikoto had actually killed her, and even then it wasn’t like they were related.

Clearly she was assigning blame where it did not at all belong.

Lee thought about pointing that out, then paused at the rather murderous expression Mikoto was giving her. It wasn’t that Lee was afraid of Mikoto, she was just afraid that if Mikoto tried to kill her again then Lee would be stuck in the hospital even longer. That, and, Tsunade had a way of knowing when things were headed south in the hospital room.

“…Tell them you realized reality was an illusion, that you yourself did not exist, and that this lack of existence is equivalent to death and therefore you metaphorically killed yourself?”

Uchiha Mikoto threw a vase of sunflowers at Lee’s head.

* * *

“What is a wizard?”

They had brought the boy back again; he’d wondered if they would. He must truly be the best, perhaps the only option they had, as far as English was concerned. And perhaps that was warranted, the boy appeared to speak fluently at the very least, there was no stutter even while there was an accent, there was little doubt in his choice of words or his translations back to his superiors.

All the same, the boy was not English, and that brought up the question of how this non-native English speaking child was their only choice for a translator. Because even if there had been someone less proficient, with only a working vocabulary, surely they would have chosen someone older like the two men sitting on either side of the child.

Thrown into a cell after being interrogated the day before, left to his own devices to either claw at the wall or tear at his skin from the inside with his blocked magic, he’d moved beyond his own listlessness then rage so that there was only the ability to think left behind.

And after a sleepless night, sitting in a dark corner, tapping his fingers against dark stone one question continued to haunt him.

What dark corner of the east had never been touched by the west?

In the course of his travels, in those long years between Hogwarts and Voldemort, he’d never ventured to the far east. He’d spent his time in Egypt, in the Americas, on the dark continent of Africa, but somehow he had never quite made it as far as China or else Japan.

Still, what he’d noticed, to his own disdain and contempt. Was that the world had appeared more and more the same with each passing decade. With the spread of the muggle British empire the ministry had spread like a disease to other magical communities until even a place like Japan would have its own Ministry of Magic, residing in Kyoto.

There were few traditions outside of the British norm that remained in these places. The Welsh and Irish druids still practiced with staves, looking in contempt at their modern British counterparts, and refusing every Hogwarts letter directed towards their children. The Jews still practiced their Kabbalistic art, ever wary to outsiders.

And in Japan, in the east, there were still Shinto shrine maidens in white and red practicing the old arts of summoning and exorcism.

But these were not Shinto priests or maidens. And even if they were, he had long since learned that there were few corners of the world untouched by the English language.

So, where was he?

He gave the boy, the little translator that could, a rather thin and humorless smile, “If you don’t mind, before I answer your question, would you answer one of mine?”

The boy frowned, relayed the words quickly to his superiors, and for a moment he didn’t wonder if he’d be hit on the head again. However, they appeared to be at least willing to cooperate with him so long as he himself wasn’t too difficult.

Which, in spite of being strapped to a chair, was actually rather pleasant of them. The ministry’s incompetence was of great help to his own plans but even he had to admit that British bureaucrats just got tiring every now and then.

“What is your question?”

“Where, exactly, am I?”

The boy blinked, studied him, then repeated words he’d said from the day before, “You are in the Village Hidden in the Leaves, _Konohagakure_.”

The Village Hidden in the Leaves, it was a poetic name, he’d give it that. Perhaps ironic too, that word hidden inside of it, not said with any real emphasis but given the fact that he had never heard of such a place it must be fairly hidden indeed.

“It’s in the Land of Fire, _Hi no Kuni_.” The boy added, suddenly, his eyes narrowed, waiting for some sign or signal from him. As if the boy expected something from him.

The Land of Fire, not ‘The Land of the Rising Sun’, nothing he was familiar with.

“Have you ever heard of the Land of Fire, the Village Hidden in the Leaves, before now?”

He shook his head, the boy seemed reassured, as if he had not expected him to have heard of this place. Well, wasn’t that both horrifying and enlightening?

(However, if they’d never had contact with the English then how did the boy know their language, how did he know the name of England as a country, how did he know this much yet know so little?)

He had more questions, but they weren’t any he’d dare ask this child, lest he show his own weakness to his captors. What had they done with his magic? Why had they imprisoned him? What did they want from him? Why ask him these questions and not others?

What had happened to Eleanor Lily Potter?

Those questions were dangerous, looking at these men he wasn’t certain those questions wouldn’t get him killed.

“Do you have any other questions?” The boy asked, and he had the feeling that the boy knew that he had more questions, but that the boy also knew that he wouldn’t ask them here and now.

“No, you may continue your interrogation.”

If the boy caught the derisive tone, that ever so polite English mockery, he gave no sign of it.  

The boy nodded, adjusted himself, regained that look of an impartial interpreter, and asked once again, “What is a wizard?”

What is a wizard? Funny, he didn’t think that he himself had asked that question of Dumbledore when he’d first explained Tom Riddle’s own nature to him. He’d told Tom he was special, that he was this thing called a wizard, but Tom had not asked ‘what exactly is a wizard’. It had not even crossed his mind to.

Perhaps he should have. He wondered what the old man would have said to something like that. Surely, he would have responded better to that than Tom Riddle’s own idiotic confession of being a parselmouth. Ah, youth, he didn’t miss it.

“A wizard, what you yourself described. In short, a person who manipulates magic to their own will.”

The boy all at once seemed frustrated, impatient, as if this answer wasn’t what he had been searching for, and quickly he reported back to his superiors before redefining his question, “That is very broad, we’re searching for something more specific. What is a wizard? What is his purpose? For what end does he manipulate magic? How would you describe a wizard?”

What was a wizard’s purpose to them? Well, that came a little too close to the meaning of life for comfort. Really, after his mild existential crisis the day before he was still slightly concerned that he might be in hell. Because only in hell would they interrogate you on insipid details like, “Why do you exist?”

Well, perhaps not for him, he had always known the reason for his own existence. Voldemort existed to rule others, as was his almost divine right. However, as with some of his own haunting questions, he was hardly going to tell that to his captors.

“A wizard’s purpose is his own, his ends are his own, the wizard is simply the wizard.” What a horrifically philosophical thing to say, to even have to explain, and why was it such an important question to these people.

Perhaps, in this country, wizards didn’t exist without purpose. It had happened before, in older magical societies, where those with the ability to use magic were drafted into the government or else great religious bodies and given a set purpose by the state.

However, no truly modern society, with the statute of secrecy in effect, thought in such collectivist terms anymore.

This would all be quite interesting, he thought to himself, if he wasn’t tied to a chair, in an unknown country, without the ability to access his magic. The day before he had been afraid, enraged, but now all he could feel was a sort of worn exasperation and a needling impatience to get these people out and just move on.

And the fact that it was a child speaking to him, this blonde haired blue eyed thing, only served to make it more insulting.

“What is a wizard’s profession? How does he make a living? What are his goods and services that he provides?”

“A wizard does whatever he feels like doing. Whatever someone is willing to pay for him to do. Just like any other person.” Just like the goddamned muggles, and Merlin, wasn’t that insulting to think? Even more so to hear it from his own traitorous lips.

This was the sort of talking that he would have branded as borderline mudbloodism.

“What was your profession?”

He felt himself stiffen, his eyes cold as he stared down at this little boy. Was, the boy had used was, as if whatever he had used to be he no longer could be that. As if Dark Lord was merely some petty hobby that had no influence on the world at all. As if anyone could have become a wizard so feared his name wasn’t spoken.

He stopped himself, forcefully, these people didn’t know him. They had no idea who he was, they had no idea where he’d come from, they had no idea what he was capable of. However galling it might be, however degrading and insulting, better to let them underestimate him. See him as what Tom Riddle could have been, might have been, rather than see him for what he truly was.

He forced himself to relax, “I was a curse breaker.”

There once was a time, in those brief moments where he’d considered pursuing a legitimate political career, where he’d thought about curse breaking for a living or else the design of wards. It had a certain appeal to the part of him that enjoyed runes, creating vast labyrinths of symbols and puzzles, but ultimately his own ambition had trumped whatever fleeting desires he had for academia.

But, if he didn’t want to be labeled as a dark lord and thrown into whatever version of Azkaban these people had then it was best not to shout his true nature and intentions from the rooftop. Besides, he could very well have the opportunity to kill everyone in this… Village Hidden in the Leaves, later and then he could show them what a grave mistake they made in unintentionally insulting him.

When he found a way back to England, when he discovered what had happened October 31, 1981, then he would show them just what slumbering dragon they had woken.  

“What is a curse breaker?”

He was very tempted to respond with a bland, “Someone who breaks curses.”

However, he had the feeling that wouldn’t be appreciated.

“Someone who lifts curses from artifacts, areas… Anything that might hold a curse upon it.”

The boy thought this over, relayed it to the men sitting beside him, and for a moment seemed truly pensive even going so far as to close his eyes in thought.

Then, after too much thought, the boy opened his eyes again and asked, “What expertise were you expected to have in curse breaking? What was your training, your specialties?”

Training, not education, but training… What a strange word to pick, and yet he couldn’t help but think that it was a deliberate choice.

“Arithmancy and runes mainly, I suppose… I also attended Hogwarts, if that’s what you’re referring to.”

There it was, the answer the boy had been looking for, there was a flash in those blue eyes and all at once, in spite of lying he felt he had given away something vital. That he had confirmed something in those few words that he should have spent all his energy avoiding.

And that gaining these people’s trust, turning it against them for his own means, just became that much harder.

The boy couldn’t seem to repress a sly, half-formed, smile.

* * *

Stranger than Uchiha Mikoto and her special eyes of death, or Danzo and his mysterious offer, was by far Uzumaki Mito walking into Lee’s room long after visiting hours were over to check on the seal the nidaime had so kindly left on Lee’s forehead.

Or, more importantly, Uzumaki Mito walking into Lee’s room with a giant fox crammed into her stomach.

Because, yes, even after blinking multiple times the giant fox in her stomach did not shrink, did not disappear, and did not simply go away like it wasn’t really there. There was a giant fox in Uzumaki Mito’s stomach.

A giant fox, that Lee couldn’t help but wonder, was some dread offspring of the Kyuubi no Kitsune who Madara had set loose on Konoha like some less moth like Mothera.

And Lee, at this point, after attempting to escape out the hospital windows only to be found by Tsunade, and after having realized she had no idea what was going on at all anymore, was at a complete loss for words.

Especially since Mito was acting like she wasn’t… pregnant with a giant fox. She must know, how could you not know there was a giant fox in your stomach? Lee would know if she was pregnant with a giant fox… Then again, Lee didn’t know there was man stuck inside of her brain and Uzumaki Kushina had never warned Lee that Mito had a giant fox in her stomach either.

Although, maybe Uzumaki didn’t know how to handle that either, that was… that was an alarming thing to know about someone.

Not to mention that Mito was far too old for babies, let alone giant fox babies, and Lee knew that if she discovered she was pregnant with a giant fox she’d be extremely concerned.

As it was, knowing that Mito was pregnant with a giant fox had her extremely concerned. And also, oddly enough, concerned about the shodaime and what sort of weirdness he and his wife got up to that would result in… that thing.

She also wondered if she was supposed to say something.

But then she might ask for advice, and the last person Lee had given advice to had the wrong kind of sharingan, and had gotten Lee hit with a clipboard by Tsunade for fighting inside of the hospital. Lee didn’t want to be hit by anymore clipboards, it was her short term goal in life, along with finally getting out of this place.

Maybe it was better to tell Hashirama and then he could tell his wife that they were going to have a giant fox baby, and not Lee. Or, even better, Lee could wait until Minato returned from god knew where and make him tell Hashirama that Mito was going to have a giant fox baby.

Then Minato could also solve Mikoto’s fratricide sharingan of doom problem.

Then Lee wouldn’t have to deal with any of this, ever, at all.

(Maybe she should convince Dead Last to do it, that sounded like a rational plan… Plus, he had to be useful for something, otherwise her response to Danzo’s offer was… Well, not great.)

Needless to say, Lee did not pay any attention whatsoever to anything Mito said or did, even when she prodded at Lee’s forehead, and asked questions about headaches, weird dreams, changes in chakra, and everything and anything in between.

Because Lee was officially done with everything ever.

Especially the universe, which had finally gone too far.

* * *

The lonely hours of the night, when the clinking of glass is dulled, and the taste of alcohol becomes bitter. When you are the last man left hunched over the counter, those colleagues you almost wish you could call friends long since returned to their wives, children, or simply their lives.

Of course, this had always been the pastime of older more pathetic men than him. Orochimaru had never found solace or pleasure in the arms of drunkenness; not like Tsunade had. His nights, his lonely sleepless evenings, were usually spent inside of his laboratory or else buried beneath scrolls and books in his study.

And they hadn’t been lonely.

He had never truly needed people, or if he did then he easily distracted himself from that need, research had seemed more important, more pressing and exciting, than Tsunade or Jiraiya had ever been. Research, his own intellect, after all would never abandon him.

Even with war, death, and despair he would always have his own self.

How could he have ever wanted more than that?

A soft sound of someone sliding onto the stool next to him, the drumming of pale thin fingers, a sigh, and then, “I am… sorry, Orochimaru-sama.”

And somehow, in spite of every sign that it was impossible, Orochimaru’s day actually managed to become worse. Turning his head only slightly he cast a baleful eye onto what he assumed was Emotional Support Lee, perhaps a greater bane to his existence than Eru Lee herself.

“You know, I am really here to support you through emotionally difficult times in your life. That’s not something I just… say.” She paused, hesitated, glanced over at him again, “You can talk to me.”

“And what would I have to say to someone like you?”

She, after all, wasn’t even a real person. She was barely better than a shadow clone. Some misbegotten mockery of life.

“Anything, nothing, whatever you feel like saying. Whatever no one else is willing to listen to.”

He grimaced, then sneered, all of his own desolation drifting from him, “Why is your maker so eager to churn you out at regular intervals? Do you think she enjoys watching you die?”

Emotional Support Lee, after all, was a needless constant in his recent life. No matter how many times he killed her or she killed herself there was always another one in the lab staring at him in judgement of everything he was and everything he cared about. As if he was never quite good enough.

“My purpose is not about her enjoyment; how Eru Lee feels or doesn’t feel about me is irrelevant. It’s what you feel, Orochimaru-sama, that matters.”

“What I feel?” He barked out a sharp laugh, “When have my feelings ever been important to you? When have you ever respected what I wanted?”

She didn’t answer for a moment, simply studied him, her eyes too green and too deep in the half-lit room. Finally she said, “I care about what you feel, not necessarily what you think you want.”

Even though she was a clone, even though her words should mean nothing, the alcohol must have dulled him enough that something in them stung, “I know what I want, I have always known what I wanted.”

He set down his glass, now empty, a few coins for the bill, and then pushed his way out of the door leaving the girl to stare after him. But of course, Eru’s clones were nothing if not annoying in their persistence, and she was out the door with him.

“Then why are you here, if you know what you want?”

He frowned, walked faster, all too aware that it wouldn’t help but not quite able to stop himself either. What he wanted, what he wanted hadn’t changed, it had been stolen from him, everything meaningful had been stolen from him by that idiot twelve-year-old genin.

And true, he could continue to toil along, create his own flawed version of the edo tensei, create his own flawed version of immortality, that hadn’t been stolen from him but…

But someone had stolen an idea from him, an idea he hadn’t even known he had, the idea of stealing everything Eru had ever created for himself, stealing her blood and her skin and her heartbeat by sealing a portion of his own chakra inside of her.

Some English shinobi bastard had stolen that idea from him eleven years beforehand and had failed.

So, no, that was the issue. He continued to want what he had always wanted, but now, now he knew that it was all pointless.

Suddenly the girl was in front of him, underneath a streetlamp, the glow of the fluorescent lighting creating a halo around her.

“Things change, Orochimaru,” she said, insistant, looking perhaps more like the original Lee than she ever had before, “Sometimes you have to let things go.”

He didn’t respond, gave no sign of even having heard her, just stopped and stared at this facsimile of the little girl who had taken everything that he’d ever believed in.

“And I know that it’s hard, I know it’s painful, I know it goes against your every instinct… But think of everyone else, think about how they view Eru Lee. Are they upset? Are they despondent? What do they see in life, in what they want from life, that allows them to coexist with her? Find that, Orochimaru, find a purpose beyond yourself…”

“A purpose beyond myself?” He repeated, dully, the words like ash in his mouth and the girl nodded, somewhat timidly, her eyes wary on him.

After all, he had never once come close to giving her what she herself wanted.

Suddenly, he smiled, a cold harsh jagged thing, “Ah, I almost forgot, Lee, about what you want.”

He motioned to her, in her false entirety, “Your goals are not so different from mine, are they? You want to die, a simple task, and yet something as unattainable to you as my goals are now to me. Instead you waste away here, in madness, and you suffer. Tell me, Lee, can you let a goal like that go? Can you find a purpose beyond yourself?”

She stilled, something dark flashed in her eyes, “You know I can’t.”

“Such a pity. I suppose we’ll both have to remain as we are then, languishing in this half existence, as we watch everything we ever wanted remain just out of reach.”

Before she could say anything else, reassure him that she could support him, that Jiraiya or Tsunade would support him, he drew a kunai from a pouch at his waist and threw it into her throat, watching as wide eyed she fell to her knees and then to the earth below the streetlamp, blood gushing from her neck.

And Orochimaru didn’t feel anything at all.


	12. Why Don't You Just Use the Eagle Summon?

_In which Haru finally starts inching up a tree, the tragic tale of Emotional Support Lee is continued, and Minato doesn’t quite understand why elves have such a profound need to sing all the time._

 

* * *

 

If anyone asked Haru, which no one ever did, then he’d honestly been waiting for something disastrous to happen.

 

Well, happen to him anyways. Things always seemed to be happening to Lee or Minato. Lee had wound up in the hospital after almost overdosing on Orochimaru’s rare poison collection from Suna and Minato had later been dragged off by Jiraiya for some S-ranked in-village mission that they could tell Haru nothing about, which left Haru, by himself, trying to walk up that damn tree.

 

Although, with basically a week of training without Lee notching up the difficulty level of sparring or mission simulations, and Jiraiya’s almost undivided attention, he’d gotten a little bit better at the whole thing. He now, if he concentrated really hard, could wobble his way up a few feet before falling.

 

It was almost like a glimpse, into some other strange world, where he and Minato had had some normal kunoichi teammate. Someone who, well… wasn’t Lee.

 

And that’s what the week or so since Lee had wound up in the hospital had been like. Almost normal. Like life had been like before he’d become a genin, when Lee was just that weird girl in his class, the one he found mildly terrifying. He trained, improved by little spurts at a time, visited Lee in the hospital a few times, then went home and told his parents that everything was going fine and that he was going to be an adequate ninja someday.

 

Of course, his family didn’t know about Lee. Oh, they knew that Haru’s team was talented, that Haru was somewhat less talented than his teammates, but they didn’t know about… Lee. He wasn’t quite sure how, because Lee wasn’t exactly subtle, and even in the civilian sector they’d seen some of the results of her daily misadventures. That said, civilians usually blamed some of Lee’s antics on jonin, or just ninja in general, they didn’t seem to get the full dose of Eru Lee necessary to understand the force of chaos that she was.

 

(But then again, Lee’s real winners like the suicidal clones usually kept themselves to the training fields or in Orochimaru’s lab and not out in the gutter where anyone could see them.)

 

To them seeing Lee with a horde of Uchiha police chasing behind her wasn’t all that different than any other strange ninja thing in the village.

 

And Haru didn’t feel like explaining that nothing about Lee was normal, nothing about her was cute, nothing about her was nice, that she was almost impossibly powerful while Haru was still barely scraping by, and that he had nightmares about her just from training exercises.

 

Well, that and… the bridge incident… Which he really tried not to think about.

 

Although, was he really terrified anymore? Somehow, he didn’t think so. Somewhere along the way he’d lost some of that mindless fear of Lee. Now he was more, well, tired he supposed and a little frustrated. He probably felt the way Jiraiya felt most of the time, like he had to reel her back into reality because she was going to go off and do something incredibly destructive and stupid.

 

Which she had, immediately after he’d told her it was a bad idea, and his opinions clearly didn’t matter to her at all. Not that anyone’s opinion seemed to matter much to her, maybe Jiraiya’s, and maybe Minato’s, but it seemed like Lee didn’t even bother to listen to anyone else either.

 

Not that this made him feel better, really, because it was still really frustrating.

 

Why did he have to be on the team filled with too powerful, idiot, geniuses?

 

Still, Haru was avidly not thinking about any of that when disaster struck, instead he was focusing on getting chakra to his feet. Not enough to blow him off the tree, but just enough to let him stick to it, a strangely difficult task that he still hadn’t gotten the hang of.

 

Even while Minato had started walking on top of water.

 

Because Minato sucked like that and sometimes Haru wanted to hate him just because he made Haru look even worse than anyone else would have.

 

(If Lee hadn’t been in their class then Haru couldn’t help but think that Minato would probably have wiped out the competition in the academy with no problem whatsoever. As it was, since Lee was there, she made Minato look passable when it came to ninjutsu and decent in everything else. Which, in turn, made the rest of them look like drooling idiots.)

 

He was just putting one foot in front of the other, almost to the top of the tree, when he heard it.

 

“Dead Last, I have a mission for you that pertains to the glorious willfulness of fire and if it’s not fulfilled then everything we know may come to an end!”

 

Haru crashed to the ground.

 

He almost didn’t want to turn around, almost wanted to pretend this wasn’t happening, but he also didn’t want to put it off, so slowly he turned his head and caught sight of Lee and Minato, both looking at him, and all the weirdness he’d been hoping to avoid crashing back into his life.

 

Too soon, it was far too soon.

 

“Oh, hi Lee, I had no idea you were out of the hospital.” Haru flushed, he really should have visited more often, but then… Even though he was her teammate he really wasn’t that close with her. It wasn’t like he knew all that much about her.

 

He knew she was from that weird rainy island called England, or something, that she was an orphan like Minato, that they lived together, that she probably ate only ramen, and that she had a gigantic amount of chakra and seemed to have no problem with any jutsu, and that she was probably secretly some kind of an alien or a fox demon.  Other than that… Well, he didn’t really know much. Honestly hadn’t wanted to know much, the way he felt, the less he knew about Lee’s personal history the better for his sanity. 

 

Besides Minato was probably there every day so it wasn’t like Haru visiting would have been welcome anyway.

 

“Yes, thank god for small favors, but Dead Last, you don’t understand. There’s something that no one else but you can do.” Lee stepped closer, gripped him by his shoulders, and looked him dead in the eye with that frightening intensity that only Lee seemed to be able to bring to these normal everyday situations.

 

Minato, for his own part, looked somewhat tired. Then again, last Haru had seen him he’d looked tired, and a little distracted. As it was he seemed to be barely paying attention, and instead was flicking through a handwritten notebook with strange symbols inside. Which was… Strange, he wondered if he’d ever seen Minato blatantly not paying attention to Lee like that.

 

“Uh… Something that I can do?” Haru honestly had no idea what that would be, at all, because as far as Haru knew he didn’t really have any special talents or abilities. He was just… well, that civilian born guy, nothing more than that.

 

“Yes, Dead Last, your destiny swiftly approaches and it can’t be denied!” Lee said, gripping his shoulders tighter and then flatly explaining, “I need you to do me two small favors.”  


Haru’s eyes drifted to Minato, who raised his eyebrows at Haru silently, as if to imply Haru was on his own with this one, “Uh, well, have you asked Minato?”

 

“…Minato’s busy.” Lee explained.

 

“Minato doesn’t look busy.” Haru responded, feeling more irritated than overwhelmed, which said a lot about his Lee exposure over the past month and a half or so.

 

“I actually am pretty busy.” Minato said, sheepishly glancing over the pages of his book and closing it momentarily, “I, uh, have to read and translate this… I’m also supposed to write a dictionary.”

 

“Besides, Dead Last, this is your calling, not Minato’s. Don’t go foisting your problems off onto him for your own convenience.” Lee chided, seemingly unaware of the fact that she seemed like she was foisting her own problems off onto Haru.

 

Haru grimaced. On the one hand he was glad that Lee was actually okay and not sick, and it was nice to see both her and Minato again. Plus, now that Lee was out of the hospital they might take an actual mission again, hopefully one with less threats on his life from plants. On the other hand, he really hadn’t missed this sort of thing, at all.

 

“Alright, what exactly am I helping you with?”

 

Lee grinned, her too large, too cheerful, too fake grin that she always gave in these sorts of situations, “I’m glad you asked, my completely and utterly talentless friend.”

 

Well, she didn’t beat around the bush when it came to Haru’s talent as a ninja. It would almost be refreshing, if he didn’t hear it all the time.

 

“First, Uchiha Mikoto approached me with a small problem the other day. One I… can’t seem to solve.” Lee admitted, not quite sheepishly, but with a certain hesitance that she usually lacked.

 

Mikoto, Haru didn’t really know Mikoto, she kept mostly to her clan and then that loud foreign Uzumaki girl (who Haru secretly thought was some sort of Eru Lee lite). Still, the last time he’d seen her she seemed alright, or at least, not with a problem large enough to warrant involving Eru Lee of all people.

 

“You see, Mikoto has developed the fratricide sharingan of doom.” Lee finally said after too long of a pause.

 

Naturally, Haru was both alarmed and confused, “The… what?”

 

Lee, Haru had learned, had a habit of using her own casual way of explaining things rather than something the general population would understand. For example, the strange jonin that had tried to assassinate her, were called plant zombies. While this might be true she still called them plant zombies (and it didn’t matter that this term had stuck because no one could think of anything better; Lee still called them plant zombies). So when Lee said things like, fratricide sharingan of doom that might not actually mean a fratricide sharingan of doom… But whatever it meant it probably wasn’t good either.

 

“Yes, you see, in comparison to your average sharingan the fratricide sharingan of doom is quite a bit more powerful and even more swirly than its counterpart. Even more than that, you can only gain it by killing your brother.”

 

There were no words, there was only stunned silence, stunned complete silence. But not for Lee who continued talking as if she hadn’t just implied that Mikoto had killed her own brother for power, “The problem is that Mikoto didn’t kill her non-existent sibling, in fact she hasn’t killed anyone, and the Uchiha elders have sort of noticed that nobody Mikoto is likely to be in contact with in the village has even died in the past week. So… She basically needs an explanation of why she has the fratricide sharingan of doom without committing said fratricide.”

 

Haru said nothing, he just stared, just stared and thought that this was his life. His life wasn’t walking up trees or anxiously fretting over the looming chunin exams, no, it was Eru Lee. Eru Lee coming up to him and telling him that he had to… Fake a murder after the fact? He wasn’t even sure what he was supposed to be doing.

 

“Well, what’s the other favor?”

 

Lee grinned again, looking relieved that he hadn’t pressed on the issue, “Oh, that one’s much easier. You just have to tell the shodaime hokage that his wife is pregnant with a giant fox.”

 

“…What?”

 

“Japanese, Dead Last, do you speak it?” Lee asked derisively, meaning that this was probably rhetorical, but still didn’t answer any of his questions.

 

“What… No… I mean, why?”

 

Lee began to use expressive hand gestures as she explained, “Well, don’t ask me why, but Uzumaki Mito is apparently pregnant with a giant fox but… I’m not sure if she actually is aware of it. So, yes.”

 

That explained nothing, nothing at all, and yet why wasn’t Haru doubting her? Why did he think that, since it was Lee, Uzumaki Mito might very well be pregnant with a giant fox? Was it just a side effect of being her teammate? Would he turn into Minato if he hung around her too long? Desensitized to anything bizarre or impossible or…

 

“But… I… Can’t you tell her… or him… or whoever?”

 

“Nope!”

 

No explanation, no reason, just that flat, forceful, nope, like there was no reason at all for Haru to think he could somehow worm his way out of this one.

 

“But… Why is this my problem?”

 

Lee just looked at him, blankly, like she had no idea how he could even fathom this question, “What other problems do you have, Dead Last?”

 

Well, when she put it like that, it was hard to immediately come up with anything. Sure, Haru had problems, he had lots of problems, but they were normal people problems. They weren’t…. They weren’t the shodaime’s wife knocked up with a giant fox.

 

“I uh…” he trailed off, panicking, knowing that he had to find something or else he’d be doomed forever.

 

Suddenly, he turned, seeing the tree, and it returned to him, “I still can’t walk up that tree!”

 

Lee looked up to the tree, eyebrows quizzically raised, “Really?”

 

“Nope, I’ve just been working, and working and I… It’s harder than it looks.” It was terrible how relieved he felt saying that, when only a moment before he had been so frustrated, but being able to deflect Lee was just…

 

But Lee looked anything but deflected, no, that was the expression she had when she was solving a puzzle and just on the verge of a solution. A horrible solution. A solution that would either involve suicidal clones, poisoning herself, or anything else that he really didn’t want to know.

 

“I can help you with that.”

 

Oh no. That grin, that demon spirit grin. Oh god no.

 

“Uh, that’s okay, it’s really not…”

 

“It really is adequate payment for your service to the will of fire,” Lee announced, perhaps a bit too smugly, “You help me with this and you will be the master of walking up trees. In the words of Uzumaki, believe it!”

 

“Oh, great… That’s…”

 

Lee grabbed his arm, pulled him along unwillingly behind her, and marched off into the village towards the Uchiha clan compound, “Now, forward comrade! Forward to victory, glory, and fixing problems we don’t understand at all!”

 

* * *

 

There were many things about Mikoto’s life that those outside of the clan couldn’t understand. She had thought Kushina might, when they’d first become friends, Kushina that loud, bright, foreign girl who didn’t seem afraid of anything.

 

Because Kushina was an Uzumaki, a clan which was just as old and, in its own way, as prestigious as the Uchiha clan. It was the founding clan of Uzushio which surely had its own secret techniques, politics, and goals separate from those of Uzugakure itself. More, Kushina wasn’t just any Uzumaki, she had been singled out and selected to be sent to Konoha to train under Uzumaki Mito. Although Kushina had never explained why, Kushina was important.

 

And now, after the fall of Uzugakure, Kushina was one of the last Uzumaki left.

 

But the Uzumaki didn’t have a dojutsu and so Kushina didn’t really understand.

 

And if the Hyuga understood, well, they would spit in the eye of an Uchiha before they ever offered any sympathy.

 

The true point was that she and Kushina were very different for all their apparent similarities. When Mikoto first met her, that nervous yet somehow brash and confident kunoichi, screaming to the whole room that one day she was going to be hokage, perhaps the only kunoichi in their year besides Eru Lee to take training seriously (and even then no one could really put Eru Lee into any sort of category with anyone) and Mikoto had wanted to be her.

 

She wanted to become someone strong, someone confident, she wanted to be able to stand tall as clan head someday instead of passing the title off onto her future husband, onto Fugaku. She wanted to be a kunoichi, a field kunoichi, someone like Tsunade, someone to be as feared and respected as any man was or ever could be.

 

Uchiha Mikoto wanted to matter.

 

And perhaps, ironically, she was now closer to that goal than she’d ever been before.

 

Because only Uchiha Madara, since the founding of Konoha, had been recorded to have gained the mangekyo sharingan.

 

Mikoto stared at her new eyes in the mirror, not the one or even advanced three tomoe sharingan she might have expected to see someday, but something much more jagged; a true scarlet pinwheel. She hadn’t made use of them yet, the clan elders expected it, of course the clan elders were still pushing for an explanation that didn’t seem to exist.

 

Mikoto was the oldest child of the clan head, the only child as it turned out, and if she had been a son there would be no contesting that she would be clan head herself someday. But she wasn’t a son, she was a daughter, and so Fugaku would end up clan head instead through marriage. No one had asked her opinion on it, no seemed to have needed to, she’d known for a very long time that this was going to be her future.

 

She might have a kunoichi career, she might make chunin, but she would never be clan head.

 

But that wasn’t the point, the point was that Mikoto didn’t have any siblings, and more importantly no one she was related to had even died. No one she knew had even died, well, besides the one.

 

No one besides the incomprehensible, alien, Eru Lee.

 

Frowning at her own reflection, turning off the sharingan, knowing that the memory of her own face would now be written on her eyelids forever, she wondered just what the hell Lee was anyway.

 

Because when she’d seen her fall so still, and everyone had gone silent, all of them realizing that Lee just wasn’t there anymore and when they’d seen her blinking and sitting up not a moment later… Mikoto had the sharp and alarming thought that Lee wasn’t human.

 

That it wasn’t some strange blood limit, some unknown dojutsu making her eyes burn that strange green color, she just wasn’t human at all.

 

Of course, thinking about Lee brought back memories of Mikoto’s own final act of desperation. She didn’t know what she had been thinking, it wasn’t like Lee would be any help with this, this was clan business. Well, that was the trouble, it was more than clan business.

 

Because the clan wanted, no needed, to know how she’d gotten the mangekyo but Mikoto couldn’t just go telling them that Lee had died, that Mikoto hadn’t killed her at all, but that Lee had… gotten better?

 

(And if she did, if she told them, what would happen to Lee? If there were no consequences after all, if someone like Mikoto could gain the mangekyo sharingan without any lasting deaths, then there was nothing to stop them from going further than imaginable. Somewhere Mikoto didn’t like thinking about.

 

Because if it was for the good for the good of the clan, the good of the Uchiha, then the elders would do just about anything.)

 

“I’m so screwed.” Mikoto said, placing her head on the desk of her vanity with a sense of ultimate defeat.

 

Maybe she could just put off questions forever, maybe she could keep going with the ‘really strong genjutsu’ argument that she’d been giving, or maybe they’d eventually buy that she just didn’t know.

 

Because she really didn’t… Lee, Lee wasn’t a relative. Lee and her weren’t even that close, truth be told, true she was one of the few girls her age that she respected but… But Mikoto didn’t really know Lee all that well, knew Kushina better, and ultimately Mikoto hadn’t been the one to kill Lee. She’ d just… she’d just been there.

 

“I’m still so screwed.”

 

Mikoto sighed, maybe she could just hide in her room forever, or move in with Kushina… Although, since Kushina lived with Mito and therefore the bastard revived Senju, this might just make everything a thousand times worse.

 

Not that the clan elders had a problem with Senju Hashirama, the clan had great respect for the shodaime, the one to reach out to the Uchiha and end the war. But the shodaime was regarded as the exception, the good seed, the problem was, well…

 

A little known fact about the Uchiha clan, when Senju Tobirama had died, at least half of the elite of the clan had thrown a party involving lots of sake. When they had found out he had been resurrected, the resorted to cursing the gods, claiming that this proved that their clan existed so that the gods could spit in their faces.

 

Mikoto’s window slid open, Mikoto lifted her head, whirled to face the window, heart thumping and bringing her hands together, only to be faced with the sight of team seven crawling inside of her room.

 

Oh no.

 

“Mikoto, I’ve brought Dead Last to deal with your problems.” Lee announced as she pushed the very hesitant, and somewhat alarmed looking, brown haired boy onto her floor.

 

Haru, Mikoto was pretty sure that was his name, although Dead Last was also accurate. Not that Mikoto didn’t like him, he actually was one of the least obnoxious boys in their class, he was polite fairly quiet though but at least he wasn’t an ass. He just… had no talent whatsoever. Frankly, Mikoto was surprised that he’d even passed the exam.

 

Lee and Minato climbed in after him, Lee with that ever cheerful smile on her face, and Minato with a resigned and somewhat exhausted expression on his. There was probably some explanation for all of this but Mikoto didn’t really keep herself informed on the daily adventures of Minato and Lee.

 

But Mikoto wasn’t thinking about that, her only thought was, “No.”

 

“No?” Lee asked, looking confused.

 

Mikoto just repeated simply, “No, you are leaving. You are not supposed to be here!”

 

They really weren’t supposed to be here, they were deep inside the compound, climbing uninvited through her window. They would get themselves killed at this rate, Mikoto was actually kind of surprised that either her mother or her father or somebody hadn’t rushed in here already.

 

“Hey, you’re the one who asked for help.” Lee pointed out, her eyes narrowed and a petulant expression on her face, “You even went so far as to summon Tsunade and her clip boarded wrath.”

 

Mikoto flushed, felt that keen sense of embarrassed regret because she really hadn’t meant to she just… Lee had been no help at all, had been worse than useless, and Mikoto had been starting to feel like she was at the end of her rope.

 

“That’s… That’s not what I mean! If you’re caught here you could be killed, or at least seriously hurt! This is the house of the clan head, Lee!”

 

Lee just blinked, looked towards the door, then looked back at Mikoto, “Oh, that, don’t worry about it. I laced the place with a genjutsu.”

 

“You what?!” Mikoto screeched

 

“I laced the place with a genjutsu, you know, these aren’t the droids you’re looking for.”

 

Mikoto could explain that Lee had somehow, supposedly, successfully placed a genjutsu strong enough to fool the entire Uchiha compound, including those with the sharingan, but she just couldn’t find the words.

 

“Anyways,” Lee continued in her typical nonchalant manner, “I found Dead Last here, the voice of normal person rationality on all of our missions, and brought him to come up with a plan that… normal people, would accept.”

 

It was actually… Well, it was thoughtful. Honestly Mikoto had thought that Lee would forget all about it, consider it not her problem and that Mikoto would be left on her own. She hadn’t realized that Lee actually would go out of her way to help. It just wasn’t something she would ever expect from Eru Lee.

 

“Thank you, Lee.” Mikoto started, eyes darting to the flushing embarrassed looking Haru, “But, I… I don’t think you can help me. This is something I need to solve myself.”

 

“Oh, alright, well how are you going to solve it?” Lee asked, looking genuinely curious.

 

Mikoto sighed, and flatly replied, “I have absolutely no idea.”

 

“Maybe you could fake a sibling somehow, a long lost evil twin you had no choice but to kill and bury?” Minato asked, looking somewhat uncertain and dubious himself. Which he should be, because that sounded like it had come straight out of one of those shows that ran on daytime television.

 

“You know, since reality is a giant illusion I’m still sticking with that plan. It has the benefit of actually being accurate.” Lee said, with an air of wisdom that she didn’t deserve at all.

 

“Why don’t you just tell them that apparently you don’t need to commit fratricide to get it. I mean, clearly you didn’t, so, just…” Minato trailed off, eyes shifted to Haru, then back to hers. Because Haru hadn’t been there, Haru still didn’t know that Lee was immortal, Haru didn’t know that Mikoto had literally watched Lee die.

 

“No one has ever gotten it from a genjutsu, or a bad dream, or an injury… If it was that easy to obtain we would all have it by now.” And that was the issue, that was why no one bought into Mikoto’s weak explanation of having bad dreams, why she couldn’t even say it convincingly.

 

“…Then go with the twin idea.”

 

Mikoto felt herself staring at Haru, watching as he fidgeted under everyone’s gaze, looking nervous and uncertain but somehow speaking onwards anyways.

 

“It doesn’t have to be an evil twin just… What if it’s a clone?” Haru’s eyes lit up, as if there was an idea deep inside them forming and growing brighter inside of his head, like everything had just clicked.

 

“A clone?” Mikoto asked.

 

“What if it was one of Lee’s clones? What if it was Emotional Support Lee?” Haru suddenly stood, began pacing, and talking as if none of them were even in the room, “What if one of Lee’s… Emotional Support Lees, got frustrated with Orochimaru, what if it walked out only instead of killing itself it tried to find a new means of fulfilling its purpose. What if it then found you?”

 

“Why would one of Lee’s clones find me?” Mikoto asked.

 

“Because it will settle for anyone at that point!” Haru said, a grin on his face, “The first person it sees who’s in any sort of emotional distress, it’ll take, because that’s its point. That’s the reason that it exists!”

 

Haru looked, strangely, so happy and all Mikoto could picture was this hypothetical clone of Lee so desperate for meaning that it would pick anyone in the world to talk to.

 

“So what if, one day, one of them finds you. And you talk, and you become friends, and the clone thinks that its finally getting somewhere. It’s finally being emotionally supportive. Only, as the weeks go on and things stay mostly the same, as life proves to be a little too complicated to solve in just one stupid conversation, it realizes that it hasn’t made a difference at all. Your problems are still problems, your life is still your life, and a few conversations on a bridge don’t mean anything!” Haru stopped paused, turned to his rather captive audience, holding out his hands.

 

“And that’s the key. It snaps, worse than the first time because now its failed with someone who isn’t even Orochimaru, its failed with the backup. In a fit of madness, it tries to kill you, solve your problems through death, and in self-defense you kill it. Thereby killing what felt like a sister. And then you stare at the body, and you burn it, just like they burn every other Lee clone in the village.”

 

Haru paused, looking at them all, his excitement drifting from him and leaving something much more somber in its place, “And that’s why you couldn’t tell them. Because how could you possibly explain this to them? A clone, something that’s not even human but feels like it should be? How could they believe that any more than they would believe a nightmare or even a genjutsu?”

 

Lee started clapping, at first slowly, and then faster a bizarre look on her face. And at the sound of it Haru first flinched and then sheepishly sat back down on the floor with his stunned teammates.

 

“That was… That was strangely beautiful, Dead Last.” Lee finally said, sounding a bit dazed, as if she wasn’t quite sure what had just happened.

 

“Where did you even come up with that?” Minato followed, less awed and more concerned, his eyes strangely piercing as he stared at Haru.

 

“Oh, well, you know… I do watch television too sometimes.”

 

Mikoto sat in stunned silence. At first it sounded ridiculous, not much better than a twin theory but… But maybe this could have happened, maybe they might believe this, since Mikoto herself could almost believe it. Mikoto had actually run into some of Lee’s clones, in the village, had mostly found them unnerving but…

 

But she could almost believe that this had happened.

 

“Clearly television is the answer to every problem.” Lee waxed poetically.

 

“I thought the will of fire was the answer to every problem.” Haru sniped back causing Minato to give the pair of them a surprised smile, Mikoto feeling one of her own sneaking onto her lips without her permission.

 

“Well, yes… That too, and of course teamwork. Can’t forget about teamwork.”

 

Minato smiled, poked Lee in the shoulder with a finger, “You know, I think you’re actually right, Lee. Teamwork is usually the answer, isn’t it?”

 

Well, it wasn’t solving Mikoto’s problems.

 

* * *

 

“Alright, Dead Last, I think that went surprisingly well.”

 

Lee, Minato, and Haru walked through the streets of Konoha on their way to the Senju compound.

 

Lee with take-out ramen, swiftly picked up from Ichiraku’s, perfectly oblivious to any of the stares she was getting. Then again, walking down the street Lee had always gotten stares from shinobi, first from sensors who knew her from her overwhelming amount of chakra and then later from people who had seen her clones or even some of her antics with ANBU or the police even.

 

Haru, with an anxious look on his face, not entirely comfortable as he walked through the streets with the two of them. Looking here and there at all of the shinobi giving them a glance and looking as if he’d like nothing more than to disappear back to the training grounds and work on climbing up that tree. Haru and that tree, that’d been a long relationship they had, and not a very pleasant one either.

 

Minato really did hope he’d master it soon and be able to move on. Otherwise, well, it couldn’t be easy to be so far behind Lee but also Minato. 

 

Minato, for his own part, hands in his pockets and head tilted back to stare at the clouds in the sky, wondered if he and Lee had ever spent so much time with Haru. He’d always felt that they were a team, that they worked well together, but all the same it wasn’t until today that he really felt it.

 

That they were three and not two with an extra guy tacked on to the end.

 

“You know; I have a name.” Haru said, a strange half grimace on his face, one that was both awkward, uncertain, and annoyed all at once.

 

“Oh, right, you know the mysterious Danzo said it at one point.” Lee said, seeming very unconcerned that she didn’t actually know Haru’s name.

 

“Who?” Haru asked, which, well Minato was wondering that as well. He didn’t know any Danzos either, nobody their age anyways, and he felt like he knew all of the adults that Lee would run into.

 

“I’m not entirely sure he actually exists. He just… appears and then disappears, and makes very strange offers about your career.” Lee said with a frustrated frown, waving off their concern with one hand.

 

And surprisingly, Minato was concerned. Lee had a habit of being very casual about certain things but still expressing them in a strangely literal manner. If Danzo had just appeared, while Lee was in the hospital, and made her some kind of an offer…

 

Minato wasn’t sure he liked the idea of that.

 

“Anyways, do you actually remember my name then?” Haru asked, moving on from the topic of Danzo.

 

“Uh…” Lee said, her face saying everything for her, that she still had no idea what it could possibly be.

 

“It’s Haru, Lee, my name is Haru.”

 

“Oh, okay, that’s cool, Dead Last.” Lee responded between a mouthful of ramen, noodles trailing from her chopsticks.

 

“That means you should use my actual name, Lee. I don’t like being called Dead Last.”

 

Minato grimaced, he’d thought Haru would give up, really it had been over a month and he’d never managed to get her to change so far. Why now? Plus, he should know that Lee rarely changed her mind on this sort of thing. There was no way he was ever going to get her to call him anything other than Dead Last.

 

“Why not?” Lee asked, perfectly oblivious to why she shouldn’t.

 

“Because it’s insulting, it’s… I don’t like being reminded all the time that I’m not as good as you. I know I’m not! But I keep trying, and I keep improving, so you don’t have to call me worthless all of the time.”

 

“It isn’t an insult.” Lee responded slowly, a little warily even, before elaborating in a much more confident tone, “I had an epiphany while I was in the hospital. Well, actually, I had several epiphanies. The more important one is that I realized that the universe has given up on fooling anyone so I should stop trying too… That was rather disheartening.”

 

Haru looked like he had no idea what to say to that. Minato wouldn’t either if, well, Lee had been insisting that the world was ending for years. Maybe someday he’d be forced to believe it, but for now he preferred to believe that Lee’s prophecies of doom were just Lee being Lee. His outlook on the world was much less depressing that way.

 

Besides, there were other things to be concerned about, like somehow translating “The Lord of the Rings”, including all the random pieces of Elvish Lee had thrown in because ‘it’s important’. That and the Tom Bombadil parts, he’d forgotten how much he’d hated the Tom Bombadil songs.

 

“…Was the other epiphany actually relevant?” Haru asked.

 

“Oh, right, I also realized that sometimes my ideas can get a little out of hand and every team needs a dead last to keep them from setting hotels on fire or else poisoning themselves.”

 

Haru looked patently unamused, “Couldn’t you do that yourself?”

 

Lee thought about this as she slurped her way through her ramen, seeming rather pensive, completely unaware that each moment she failed to answer seemed to increase Haru’s irritation with her, “Probably not.”

 

Haru said nothing, appeared at a complete loss for words, however if he had enough chakra to actually have substantial killing intent Minato was certain that he’d be a giant neon sign of potential homicide right now.

 

Well, Minato thought, he could probably get involved in this and try to diffuse the situation. But, then, he also didn’t have to, and like Lee had apparently decided when it came to dealing with Mikoto’s strange problems as well as Uzumaki Mito’s, he was perfectly fine with foisting his problems onto somebody else.

 

So Minato, instead of saying something, just pulled the “Fellowship of the Ring” back out, flipped through the pages, and continued reading about the Council of Elrond and wondering just why the elves seemed to enjoy singing so much. Really, they’d probably have less worries about Sauron coming if they spent fifty percent less time singing about things.

 

Lee grinned over at Haru, seemingly oblivious to the uncomfortable atmosphere she herself had caused, “Anyways, good work today, Dead Last! We’re making excellent progress on these very strange problems presented to me while I was in the hospital. Now all we have to do is tell the shodaime that his wife is having a giant fox baby and then you can finally walk up a tree! Isn’t that exciting?”

 

“…You know, Lee, I just… Never mind, forget it.” Haru sighed, crossed his arms, and looked as if he was very tempted to mutter under his breath about the unfairness of life and how he didn’t even understand what was going on anymore.

 

Minato, still more or less engrossed in “The Lord of the Rings”, wondered if Gamgee Samwise didn’t feel the same way every now and then.

 

* * *

 

Lee felt the day had been going spectacularly. The sun was shining, the grass was green, it was still summer, she was out of the hospital, Dead Last finally showed he was good for something, nobody had approached her with anymore of their weird problems, and Lee was well on her way to pretending nothing in the hospital had ever happened.

 

Including Mito having a giant fox baby.

 

So, with a grin, standing at the head of their triangle formation (Minato with a puzzled expression as he continued to read his book, and Dead Last with an expression that looked like he finally understood the futile nature of his resistance against the whims of the universe) Lee knocked on the door to the Senju compound.

 

Then, when no one answered, she knocked again.

 

“Maybe, no one’s home.” Dead Last murmured, which Lee ignored, because somebody was always home in this place. Sure, she’d never actually visited the overly large Senju compound (especially considering she only knew three Senju), but somebody had to be home.

 

Lee knocked louder, with more insistence, and was still met with silence.

 

“…So, can I go home now?” Dead Last asked, looking far too pleased with himself at the idea of giving up before they’d even begun.

 

Honestly, this was way easier than dealing with Mikoto, all he had to do was tell the shodaime that his wife was having a fox baby and then not be slaughtered as the messenger of this unfortunate news. How difficult was that? Lee could do that, even, if she actually felt like it and wasn’t sort of overwhelmed by how surreal her life had gotten in the past week.

 

Lee finally gave up knocking, took in a deep breath, and concentrated, “It appears we have no choice gentlemen.”

 

“…Um, I think we have plenty of choices.” Haru pointed out, rather unhelpfully because other choices clearly were not legitimate choices.

 

“Wait, why aren’t they just using Gandalf’s eagle summons? Are they just conveniently not available or something?” Minato asked, clearly not paying attention to any of this as his eyebrows raised higher.

 

Lee pointed to the door, “We must go in!”

 

“Uh, bad idea.” Dead Last said, “I was against sneaking into the Uchiha compound but I’m really against sneaking into the Senju compound.”

 

Lee just stared at him, blankly, not quite sure where he was trying to go with this whole useless commentary on her ideas thing. Maybe her speech had gone a little too far to his head, he wasn’t suddenly the idea guy after all.

 

If anyone one of them was the strategist it was probably Minato. Lee was ridiculously overpowered ninjutsu and the heavy hitter in general, Minato was frontline taijutsu and strategy, and Haru got hit in the opening gambit and provided vaguely moral support. That was just how their team dynamic went.

 

Dead Last continued with an almost valiant insistence, “No, really, we may actually die if we do this. And then on the memorial stone they’ll etch in under our names that we didn’t die in glory, but instead tried to vandalize the Senju clan compound because we’re complete jackasses!”

 

“Your insight is valid, Dead Last, but ultimately useless.”

 

Lee opened the door, using the incredibly useful unlock no jutsu, and stepped inside completely ignoring Dead Last’s horrified expression as well as Minato’s continued puzzled reading of his book.

 

“Aren’t you concerned, Minato?!” Dead Last scream whispered at Minato, attempting to convey both silence and rage in the same moment, as he rushed in after Lee who was busy making her way down the hallway.

 

Minato blinked, lowered his book again, “Oh, well, considering the nidaime asked me to translate this, and that I’m one of two people in the village who knows _English_ ; I don’t think he’ll kill me.”

 

“But I’ll still be dead!”

 

Minato paused, regarded Dead Last, “Oh, well, you know I doubt they’ll actually kill us… You have to expect this sort of thing from Lee, after all.”

 

“That is not at all reassuring!” Dead Last replied, before hoarsely whispering, “You’re failing at your job!”

 

“My job?”

 

“It’s your job to keep Lee in line! And you are failing, miserably!”

 

Minato’s eyes narrowed and a very displeased look crossed his face, “I believe that’s your job, Dead Last.”

 

Before they could bicker any further they both stopped, realizing that Lee had reached the living room. Lee for her own part cheerfully waved at whatever inhabitants might be in there, grinning all the while, feeling very pleased with herself, “Hi former hokages! I’ve brought Dead Last to tell the shodaime really shocking yet important news that concerns us all and…”

 

Lee stopped, trailed off, and found herself not simply staring at the two former hokages but Mito, Jiraiya, and a strange man she had never met before with dark hair, pale blue eyes, and a painted seal on the back of his neck.

 

And a lot of killing intent focused solely on her.

 

Lee had the strange, sudden feeling, that Dead Last might have been right after all. Walking into the Senju compound could very well lead to her imminent, if temporary, demise.

 

“…Oh, I’m interrupting something, aren’t I?”


	13. Teatime with Tobirama and Lee

_In which the English shinobi begins to realize just how far and how long he is from the world he knew and almost conquered, Eru Lee manages to obliviously ruin the plans of everyone around her, and Haru grudgingly relays Lee’s message to the shodaime and friends._

* * *

 

“My lord, there is a prophecy.”

 

Late May, 1980, the sun setting outside the windows of the Malfoy manor where the dark lord Voldemort had temporarily taken up residence. The light caught on the papers strewn about the mahogany desk, on the texts of ancient half-forgotten magic, and outside the windows the Malfoy grounds stretched like a poor wizard’s mockery of Versailles and its aristocratic grandeur.

 

Severus Snape, young, pale, hopelessly proud and eager, angry almost beyond comprehension, and willing to destroy himself for a cause he barely understood was on his knees. He’d knelt there, dark eyes shining up upon his lord, the false idol he had chosen to worship, and didn’t have the slightest comprehension that within a year of saying those words he would be begging on those same worn knees for mercy for the woman he had unwittingly sent to the slaughter.

 

But this wasn’t the Severus Snape who, with horror, would later beg for Lily Evans’ life, promising anything and everything just so that she might live. This was, in many ways, a much younger more naïve man who felt that in spite of his own mixed blood he had finally earned his lord’s favor; not yet realizing that there was nothing in the world that could wash away the stain his wife beating drunkard muggle father had left on his pedigree.

 

(Tom Marvolo Riddle would know, he had his own bastard father to contend with.)

 

He could remember so clearly that evening, the sun an oversized bleeding eye drawing unwillingly closed, and Severus Snape staring up at him with both concern, hope, and that ever present anger.

 

There was once a prophecy.

 

There was once a prophecy and he had once tried to be very clever. Like the father of Oedipus, Laius, that doomed king, on hearing of his own destruction he had sought to prevent it swiftly and efficiently. But hubris was a grave sin, one that he had not even realized he possessed for all of his own admittance to his own arrogance.

 

It was supposed to be a boy, there had never been any mention of a girl in those first reported lines, and so when Neville Longbottom was born he did nothing. When Eleanor Potter was born, when she was ushered into a safe haven by her desperate parents who were so certain he’d strike even with that small switch in gender, he did nothing.

 

Instead, when fortune brought him Peter Pettigrew begging for sanctuary at the cost of all those who would call him friend, he turned his attention to the girl, the one that almost fit. The girl who matched every single marker except the one, that one crucial detail, gender. Such that, he sometimes would wonder, if her parents hadn’t falsified her documents or the reports just to dissuade him from coming after them.

 

On October 31, 1981 he would enter the Potter safe house and massacre the entire family sending Bellatrix and a few choice others to deal with the more likely prophesized child in his stead.

 

His wand pointed at her head, slightly off center, her mother’s corpse cooling rapidly, those vibrant green eyes vacant, his hand with a steadiness that spoke of years of practiced and indifferent homicide starting with his father all those years ago, and the infant’s green eyes staring up at him…

 

And here they were again, gazing back at him with his own perfect indifference, out of the face of an adolescent girl.

 

* * *

 

(“…Oh, I’m interrupting something, aren’t I?”)

 

It wasn’t quite the feeling of knowing someone from somewhere, of recognition, but more a strange overwhelming feeling of importance. An odd magnetized feeling that drew her eyes to his and refused to waver even for a moment.

 

She knew this feeling.

 

She’d almost forgotten it, it’d been so long since she last felt it, but she knew this feeling.

 

The last time, it had been Namikaze Minato, that small foreign boy sitting on the floor of the orphanage looking at her with a curious expression and a kind, charming, smile (and a fox, fire, death, and salvation standing in his shadow).

 

And just like then time seemed to slow, a second stretched itself into an eternity, and watching him watching her there wasn’t any thought of what he was thinking or who he might be. Just that pounding, incessant, insistence that this was important.

 

And then he tensed, his legs pushing upwards from his sitting position, springing him forward towards her, his hands reaching out and…

 

And Jiraiya tackled him, pinning him to the top of the table managing to spill four cups of tea in the process, locked the man’s arms beneath his weight and pressed the man’s face into the wood. For a moment the table groaned, shuddered, then broke under the combined weight of Jiraiya and the easily six-foot-tall stranger who had just tried to… strangle Lee?

 

She wasn’t quite sure what his intentions were, if he had any at all, because surely anybody knew that trying to attack a genin in the presence of the shodaime, nidaime, and the toad third of the legendary three was a horrible idea and unlikely to be successful.

 

And Lee’s week, which had already been too weird to process, became even weirder.

 

Lee glanced at Minato and Dead Last, both of whom had stopped bickering and were staring at the scene in front of them blankly, neither appearing to know what to say. Which, well, surprisingly Lee was right there with them.

 

“…Right, well, maybe we should go…” Lee continued, watching as the man tried to squirm his way from under Jiraiya, which he apparently found completely and utterly humiliating by the baleful look on his face. It was a look that she would have said was patently Orochimaru in any other situation; namely if it was Orochimaru giving it.

 

Perhaps it was warranted though, if Lee was flailing like a half-dead fish crushed by a whale or else an eager young girl taking it from behind by her sensei, she knew she would probably die of shame. Or at least recognize that she looked beyond ridiculous.

 

Lee turned to her teammates, ushered them back out of the room, which they left unwillingly, their eyes still glued to the broken table and the man wriggling on top of it. Which, well, it was like watching a train wreck, or something even more enthralling and bizarre than a train wreck.

 

And they couldn’t even see Mito’s giant fox baby still cramped and napping inside of her stomach. Which… Dead Last was still going to have to deal with a that one in Lee’s place.

 

Only before Lee or anyone else could skedaddle the nidaime was suddenly right beside them, hand gripping the collar of her shirt, practically growling in her ear, “And where do you think you’re going, Eru Lee?”

 

That sounded rhetorical, and terrifying, but mostly rhetorical. Still, if she wasn’t supposed to answer she had no idea why he was glaring and seemed to be patiently waiting for an answer.

 

“…Home?” Lee finally guessed, giving what she hoped was a winning smile.

 

Senju Tobirama smiled back, that polite entirely false smile, then threw her back into the room hard enough that she hit the wall. Minato swiftly followed, smacking against the wall with a dazed expression, and then Dead Last bringing up the rear by swiftly retreating back into the room under the nidaime’s intimidating glare.

 

Lee looked at Minato, Minato looked at Lee, without a single word between them they realized that they were well and truly hosed now and might as well get comfortable.

 

Lee crossed her legs and found her eyes almost unwillingly drawn back to Mr. Wriggles, who now had started cursing in English, getting really colorful too with it. Some of it was Masterpiece Theater worthy, or if not that, at least graphic and somewhat creative.

 

_“I will devour your entrails, hang the head of your wife from a lamppost, and turn your children into mindless cultists who will eat the dirt I walk upon!”_

 

He didn’t seem to mind that Jiraiya had no idea what the hell he was saying or the fact that Jiraiya did not have a wife or children, still Minato and Lee understood, although a lot of this lost its effect through his breathless delivery as he tried to remove Jiraiya.

 

Before she could comment on this, or Minato could, the nidaime was casually sitting down with them, still smiling that tight lipped, displeased smile.

 

“You know, it is amazing.” The nidaime commented, rather pleasantly in spite of the wafts of angry chakra coming from him. Out of the corner of her eye Lee couldn’t help but notice that the tea that had been spilled onto the remains of the table and floor was now starting to bubble.

 

“What’s amazing?” Lee asked slowly, almost regretting asking.

 

“How swiftly, and easily, you’ve managed to single handedly ruin a secret and extremely delicate operation!” And whatever semblance of control the nidaime had was gone, and there was that blazing anger that had been so very present against Tsunade only a week or so before.

 

Lee was very tempted to teleport away, if only she wasn’t absolutely certain the nidaime could track her down like a vengeful bloodhound.

 

Before the nidaime could comment further, or kill her, a voice interrupted, “Hey, Tobi, let’s not get carried away with all this… I think Lee-chan said she had something important to say to me, right?”

 

The shodaime was turned toward them, giving them an awkward grin of his own, while his wife still watched Jiraiya and the struggling man with raised eyebrows. The struggling English speaking man, which… Now that Lee thought about that, was extremely odd as she was pretty damn sure she and Minato were the only ones who spoke English anywhere.

 

“Well, uh, Dead Last has something important to say to you.” Lee said, motioning to the suddenly alarmed looking Dead Last, “But I think it can wait, you guys seem kind of busy.”

 

“Get carried away? In what way am I getting carried away?! Eru Lee, the last person we want inside of this room right now, just waltzed through every single seal I had protecting this place, and doesn’t even look concerned! How am I getting carried away, Hashirama?!”

 

Lee had to agree that Senju Tobirama seemed a little over the edge at the moment.

 

“Well, maybe it’s a good thing they came…” Hashirama started, glancing back at the man and then back to them.

 

“A good thing?! How is this a good thing?! Enlighten me, oh wise older brother.”

 

Hashirama’s smile fell, a strangely odd serious look crossed his face, a look similar to that worn by his statue on the hokage monument. It didn’t fit, not half as well as that oversized ridiculously cheerful look, “We can’t understand a word he’s saying, that he’s been saying since we brought him here, you knew we would have to find Minato. And eventually, even if you don’t like the idea, we’d have to bring Eru Lee.”

 

“Well, uh, at the moment he’s colorfully describing how he’ll turn Jiraiya into fois gras and feed him to the war starved orphans whose parents he slaughtered.” Lee helpfully informed them, which probably wasn’t helpful but at least was slightly interesting to hear about.

 

Neither man said anything for a moment, just glanced back with raised eyebrows at the man on the floor, then at each other, “See, we would not know that if Lee-chan hadn’t been here.”

 

The nidaime sighed, looking like the noise had been torn out of him against his will, and toned down his lethal anger into a grumbling sort of irritation that seemed like his default emotional state.

 

“If I catch you coming into this compound without my, my idiot brother’s, or my sister in law’s express permission I will make you wish that you had managed to poison yourself. Is that clear?”

 

Lee nodded slowly, her eyes darting to the rather pale expression on Minato’s face, and the look of more than extreme alarm on Haru’s, “Super.”

 

“So, Lee-chan, how have you been?” The shodaime asked, after the silence had continued a bit too long, that overly cheerful oblivious smile back.

 

She was about to absently respond, dead, but then she remembered that this was apparently an S-ranked secret that she wasn’t entirely sure that the shodaime or nidaime were in on, she knew Dead Last wasn’t at the very least. Although, if anyone deserved to be in on it they probably did, or should, Lee wasn’t actually sure who would be considered in the ‘need to know’ as far as Lee’s Jesus no jutsu was concerned.

 

“I’ve had a rather alarming week.”

 

He nodded in sympathy, still seemingly oblivious to the way his brother’s eyebrow twitched, “Oh, I completely understand. The week after I rose from the dead was very alarming, well, not as alarming as dying was but… Oh, Tobi, what’s that word for something that’s a little more than strange but slightly less than worrying?”

 

“Surreal.” The nidaime ground out through grit teeth.

 

“That’s right, surreal, it was very surreal.” He paused then, glanced at the flailing cursing man again, and added, “This week has been rather surreal for me too, though.”

 

“Mine was worse.” Lee said, without thinking, but really she discovered Mito’s fox baby that had… Although the shodaime would be shortly discovering Mito’s fox baby, then his week might match hers.

 

“Really, I’m sorry to hear that Lee-chan. I’ve found it’s not a very comfortable situation to be in. Of course, I appreciate being alive, I really do. And seeing the village again, and Tsunade-chan all grown up, and all of her friends and…” Suddenly, out of the blue, the shodaime began crying. At first it was just overly large tears, then it was straight out bawling. Lee watched in fascination, not quite sure how to react.

 

“And he wonders why no one respects him.” The nidaime muttered under his breath, pointedly staring straight ahead at Jiraiya and his captive rather than looking at his brother.

 

“I’ve just… I missed so much Tobi! And you, you had to be hokage and deal with my mess! And then you died, and Mito had to live all by herself, and then Tsunade didn’t have anyone and then Nawaki died! I didn’t even know Nawaki existed!”

 

This was apparently very sad.

 

“You were dead before he was even born.”

 

This was apparently incredibly irritating.

 

“And I missed everything!”

 

The nidaime didn’t say anything, just resolutely kept ignoring his brother, as well as the odd look he was getting from the man pinned underneath Jiraiya. Like if he pretended it wasn’t happening then it wasn’t.

 

“Not to interrupt, or anything,” Jiraiya cut in for the first time, glaring up at them from the floor, “But I really would appreciate some help here.”

 

* * *

 

Wasn’t it strange, Tobirama thought to himself, to see his own student in the hokage’s robes wearing a face older than both his and Hashirama’s? Hiruzen had come into his own, of course, he had been promising even back then on that last mission where Tobirama had had to make the pressing decision his brother had not even had time to make.

 

Hashirama had wanted to pass the hat to Madara, had wanted Madara to be the first hokage even, and perhaps if things had gone as planned, if Madara had not proven to be more dangerous and deranged than even Tobirama could imagine, then perhaps it would have been Uchiha Madara who would have worn the hat instead.

 

Instead it was Tobirama, the younger brother, always left to pick up the pieces and somehow glue it all together in a way that fit, all while standing in the great shadow his brother had left behind. Make it more than clans all living in the same walls, make it a village, give them village techniques, create special covert operations for the village itself, build the infrastructure, create the police force, create different levels of ninja, so many things that should have been done in the beginning if only there had been time…

 

It was jarring to see the village that had grown in the twenty odd years since his death, as if he was an outsider peering in, not truly a part of it anymore. Sometimes there seemed no resemblance at all from the seeds he had planted to the trees that had grown from them.

 

In many ways it was the village he had created, not the one Hashirama had managed to inspire into existence, but that roughly patched thing that was Tobirama’s; but in many other ways it was not.

 

But now wasn’t the time to look backwards, to flounder in this unknown presence attempting to find some purpose for himself, now he was sitting with his student trying to understand a problem that neither had encountered before.

 

That of the English shinobi, the wizard.

 

The sandaime hokage was glancing over the myriad of reports submitted to him on the English shinobi, his eyes tracing Tobirama and Mito’s technical sketches on the nature of Eru’s seal, Jiraiya’s scrawled notes on the man’s every twitch and what they might imply, and Orochimaru’s short and to the point notes on everything and anything in between.

 

Over half of it was speculation. The other half was completely reliant on Namikaze Minato’s ability to translate very culturally sensitive words from English.

 

“Well, sensei, I’m guessing you know why I called you into my office.” Hiruzen sighed, taking his pipe from his mouth, folding his hands and casting Tobirama a rather weary look.

 

“Keeping the _English_ shinobi, the _wizard_ , in T&I is no longer productive.” Tobirama concluded, gravely, voicing the same opinion he had reached at the end of that last session along with the final note of advice he had written inside of his own report.

 

With a weary sigh of his own, Tobirama explained what Hiruzen had probably already concluded himself, “The information we want from him, need from him, isn’t something you can flush out quickly in a cell. Let alone when he can’t understand anyone except for two twelve-year-old green genins. We’re not looking for names, we’re looking for techniques, for training, for an entirely foreign branch of fuinjutsu. He knows we’re serious now, he knows where he could end up if he doesn’t play by our rules, but keeping him there now will do more harm than good.”

 

Or, at least, it would get them nothing. The man would answer yes or no, lie where he felt it was necessary and when he thought he could get away with it, but to actually delve into the philosophy and teachings behind his own techniques… Not in there, not to Namikaze Minato and a one-way mirror, and certainly not with the language barrier standing between them.

 

This would take time, take integration in the village, would take a probation period, and perhaps even integration into the shinobi forces themselves as had sometimes happened with captured ninja from other villages or missing ninja with no particular qualms with Konoha.

 

Of course, in those situations they had known almost all there was to know about the shinobi in question. And rarely would there be such a strong hint of a connection between the ninja in question and an asset like the Eru bloodline.

 

“But, you don’t trust him.” Trust, this was not a civilian’s trust Hiruzen was talking about, this was a shinobi’s version of trust. Something sharper, deeper, and far more paranoid than that of someone who did not occasionally kill for a living.

 

“No, of course not.” Tobirama said shortly, his mind wandering back to that cell, to watching the man behind the glass avidly looking for any clue that might bring him closer to that holistic picture, “If he had more context of our world I’m sure he would tell us exactly what he thought we wished to hear. He seemed to believe that admitting to being trained in fuinjutsu was far less damning than anything else he might have said; even with his bizarre occupation as an exorcist. But that seal he inscribed on Eru Lee’s forehead says more than enough for him.”

 

“You’re making this difficult.” Hiruzen commented rather drily, “I was perfectly fine ignoring this _England_ issue before you were resurrected.”

 

He had noticed, noticed rather bitterly in fact.

 

“It doesn’t change the fact that it is an issue.” Perhaps not a pressing one, compared with the politics in the shaky aftermath of the second war, not to mention Eru Lee herself and the looming chunin exams where everyone in the world might see exactly what power Konoha would be bringing to the table. Compared to that, a mysterious land that no one had ever heard of sounded like a daytime hobby.

 

“Unfortunately, I happen to agree, as does my head of T&I.” Hiruzen grimaced, “Which makes things rather complicated.”

 

Because shoving him into a cell had been easy enough, as had slapping enough chakra suppression seals on him to keep him in check, but building a relationship, releasing him bit by bit into their village, that was much harder.

 

“Danzo believes that he should be transferred to ANBU’s custody, given a minder, and kept more or less in the bowels of the village out of sight and mind.”

 

Somehow, Tobirama wasn’t surprised by that.

 

Danzo always did love his clandestine operations, perhaps this was a blessing as someone had to manage ANBU and the sometimes grisly tasks they would perform, but none the less there was a balance to be had with all solutions. While the village could not exist without covert operations the village would cease to exist if covert operations were all they performed. After all, Hashirama’s village was an escape from death not a machine to make it more efficient.

 

In those final moments, pressed in by enemies on all sides with no way out for all of them, he’d doubted that Danzo understood that or could ever be made to understand that.

 

Upon rising from the dead, that he had more or less been proven right. A benefit to the village, truly, and in a way Tobirama was as proud of him as he was his other students but… He also wondered what this second war had done to turn him into the man he was today.

 

“And you don’t?” Tobirama asked, rather pointlessly, as Hiruzen wouldn’t be bringing this up if he had already decided it was the best course of action.

 

“Perhaps this is more secure, prevents him from stabbing us so easily in the back, but it’s little better than a cell in T&I. Not to mention, ANBU isn’t where his intelligence is needed.”

 

Fuinjutsu, it appeared, was almost a lost art with masters few and far between. With the fall of Uzushio, of the Uzumaki, the greatest fuinjutsu wielding clan across the elemental nations had fallen and all of their techniques and practices with them. What remained were a few scattered masters, only two and a half centered in Konoha, in Tobirama, Mito, and the young jonin sensei Jiraiya.

 

There were perhaps a few in ANBU who might dabble, who might be able to manage something a little more impressive than a containment seal, but the knowledge of the great intertwined seals carved into the walls of Konoha itself would soon be gone.

 

ANBU would have no idea what questions they should ask a seal master let alone a foreign one.

 

“What would you do, sensei, if you were wearing the hat today instead of me?”

 

What would Tobirama have done?

 

He probably would have spent a few nights drinking warm sake and cursing the gods at his ill fortune; the last thing he would have needed then was some foreign seals master showing up out of a genin’s forehead. Of course, this implied that he would have had to deal with Eru Lee’s miraculously horrifying ninjutsu growing pains, in Hiruzen’s place, and wouldn’t that be horrible.

 

He probably would have taken the girl as an apprentice himself, infrastructure building, his own students, and more be damned. If only because he wouldn’t trust himself to delegate control over someone with that sort of power and inventiveness to his fledgling jonins; still tied far too closely to their respective clans. Well, that would tie her to what remained of the Senju, which would no doubt have caused the Uchiha to throw a melodramatic fit as they were wont to do.

 

And he would be left with the thought that if Hashirama was still alive, Hashirama was still hokage, then they would listen and understand and hold the village together before it all fell to pieces.

 

But fortunately, that was not the situation he was forcing himself to consider. There was no need to think what ifs like that. Similarly, there was no need to think that he would have been able to contact Uzushio, the closest thing they had to a sister village, and request some of their seals masters to give their input…

 

However, he had to remind himself that this was no longer an option. Uzushiogakure no longer existed.

 

So, in Hiruzen’s position with this world that Hiruzen now lived in, what would he as hokage decide to do with their English friend? Get him out of T&I, set him on a probationary path towards potential service, get him a minder and perhaps covert observance by ANBU, and one day in the future when the language barrier had been crossed and his motives understood reevaluate his standing in the village and his potential service as a Konoha shinobi.

 

It would be easiest if his public minder was also a fuinjutsu master, someone specifically set out to learn what he knew of his craft and his understanding of it. As of this moment there were only three, perhaps four, people viable for this position inside of the village, Mito, Tobirama, Jiraiya, and Orochimaru if they were truly desperate.

 

However, Tobirama wouldn’t trust Orochimaru with a ten-year-old academy student let alone a foreign ninja he had already portrayed frankly alarming animosity towards. Jiraiya, while something of a perverted loudmouth, was the better choice of the two, but as a jonin sensei (more importantly the jonin sensei of Eru Lee and perhaps the most powerful genin team to come out of Konoha since Hiruzen’s students), he would be a terrible choice to mind the man. Especially if they wanted to choose when and how they revealed Eru Lee’s existence within the village to him.

 

Mito, perhaps could, if it weren’t for her status as the kyuubi jinchuuriki as well as having Kushina as her apprentice. If the man was clever, and they began discussing seals, then he could very well put two and two together concerning Mito. If he wasn’t willing to dangle Eru Lee in front of his nose he was not going to dangle Mito or the future jinchuuriki either. Still, Mito should be involved, should speak with him regularly and provide her expert opinion. She just couldn’t act as that primary minder.

 

Which left… well, Tobirama himself.

 

Tobirama wasn’t busy, in fact was almost worryingly idle. In spite of the fact that he and Hashirama had been… not dead, for a fair amount of time now, neither had been put back into the missions’ roster. Of course, objectively Tobirama did understand, because to any other village having the shodaime and nidaime hokage on the missions’ roster would practically be a declaration for a third war. Like the jinchuuriki there were some shinobi you did not place into the field unless you truly meant to make a statement. Still, Tobirama felt, well, the closest he’d felt to being grounded was that one bizarre mission with team seven and this past week dealing with the English ninja.

 

He had more than enough time to monitor the man.

 

Not to mention, should the man prove to have a more varied background than simply fuinjutsu, Tobirama was equipped to handle that. Tobirama had no S-ranked secrets surrounding his identity or that of his students. He already planned to learn English, to get some informal crash course through Namikaze Minato and Eru Lee. Not to mention, it would give Hashirama something to do as well, and while Tobirama could see through attempts to stab them in the back it was Hashirama who might give the man the inspiration not to.

 

That, or, Hashirama would convince him that they were all idiots and he wouldn’t be able to take any of them seriously. Somehow, though, even his staunches doubters, those who had labeled him a sentimental fool, had come to see that dream Hashirama had painted as a child with Madara.

 

Not to mention Mito would be close by, living in the same compound as them, and could stop in and step out as needed.

 

It was a surprisingly elegant solution, one Tobirama was actually quite proud of, and one that Hiruzen seemed to find the most reasonable solution for everyone involved.

 

Unfortunately, he’d forgotten to take Eru Lee herself into account or her apparent ability to completely ignore and nullify the seals he and Mito had long since carved into the compound walls.

 

“So that’s my brain ninja?” Eru Lee asked, eyebrows raised, looking at the man who they had finally managed to coerce into a sitting position and through translation via Minato had revealed what a terrible idea it would be to attempt to assault Eru Lee again.

 

The man still watched though, his eyes would flicker to her at every opportunity, weighing her, weighing his options, and gathering every scrap of information they were willing to give him. Tobirama would eat his headband if the man wasn’t a shinobi; no matter what he might call himself.

 

“Yes,” although he would infinitely prefer it if she avoided any Leeisms like ‘brain ninja’. And he just had the alarming thought that he’d just used Lee’s name to create a word, good god, he was going to turn into Jiraiya.

 

“I’d say I expected him to be taller but he’s actually pretty damn tall.” Lee commented, still with those raised eyebrows, eyes seemingly glued to the man’s.

 

“Uh, I’m sorry, nidaime-sama, but what is a… brain ninja?” The third teammate, Matsuda Haru, asked Tobirama, visibly more nervous than both Lee and Minato combined.

 

An S-ranked secret that three genin now were perfectly aware of.

 

“Nidaime-sama, why is he here?” Minato asked, of the three looking perhaps the least dazed by the situation, his eyes narrowing on the man. Of course, Minato had the most interaction with the man out of all of them thus far.

 

“He could not be kept inside of a cell forever.”

 

Judging by the look on the boy’s face he would much rather if that had been the case. Perhaps, as the closest to Lee, that made some amount of sense for the boy but none the less the statement remained true. You couldn’t leave a man inside of a cell forever and expect any good to come of it; no matter what he might be capable of.

 

“Well, I suppose since you two are here you might as well translate.” Tobirama finally ground out, fingers rubbing at his temples, thinking how this was so much more difficult than he wished it could be.

 

“Oh, um, what do you want to ask him?” Minato asked, eyes darting to the man and then back again.

 

“First, tell him that he’s in the Senju compound and will be a guest here for the foreseeable future. However, tell him that being a guest means that he must abide by certain rules lest he find himself in a cell once again.”

 

Minato dutifully repeated this to the man, who for a moment looked somewhat bemused, before that neutral expression stole over his features once again.

 

“Tell him that I’m Senju Tobirama, introduce my brother, Mito, Jiraiya, and tell him that he’s going to be in very close contact with us for a while to come. Tell him that myself, Mito, and Jiraiya are all seal masters and are interested in his own background in the subject as well as his understanding of chakra as a whole. However, also tell him that we’ll go over this at our and his leisure and that there’s no true rush.”

 

After Minato finished translating this, to the still silent man, who looked very much as if he didn’t believe a word they were saying or at least was taking it with a rather large grain of salt, Tobirama said, “Now, I want you to ask him why he attacked Eru Lee and what his history is with her.”

 

Minato did that, the man just smiled, an unamused flat smile that was rather patronizing. He then said something in a rather cheerful tone which was probably at exact odds with what he had said.

 

“He asked, don’t you know that already?”

 

“Well, that was informative.” Jiraiya groused, more than a little irritated as he took a sip of the tea he had been poured after the table incident.

 

Lee looked at the man with somewhat raised eyebrows, “Oh, good god, is he going to monologue us? This sounds like the opening to a monologue of the Bond James variety if not the _thespian_. I’m not sure I’m interested.”

 

“Aren’t you? We found him inside of your head after all.” Tobirama pointed out.

 

“Well, true, but…” Lee trailed off uncertainly, face twisted in discomfort.

 

Tobirama prompted, effectively cutting off Eru Lee, “Tell him that we would like to hear his opinion on it.”

 

Minato translated this, the man simply grinned, perfectly aware that Tobirama and the rest of them had no idea what his connection to Eru Lee was. Well, they knew he had placed his own chakra in her head, which perhaps was more than he suspected. But the details eluded them, and would most likely continue to elude them even if they were to throw him back into a cell.

 

No matter how tempted Tobirama might be when faced with that smug expression.

 

“Well, Tobi, I don’t think he’s going to tell us.” Hashirama said, with a rather apologetic look, which was entirely unnecessary for the situation.

 

“No, I don’t think he is.” Tobirama concluded, but that did not mean they would never learn, these things had a way of revealing themselves over time.

 

Already the man had proved that he very much knew who Eru Lee was, on sight, after spending a decade as a sliver of chakra trapped in a seal on her forehead. To know her so well as that, to have such a clear impression of her, that spoke volumes of his connection to her and to her clan.

 

“I just hope that one of you idiots will fix my table.” Mito responded, the first thing she’d said in quite some time, eyeing her destroyed table flatly, and looking at Hashirama making it clear that he was the idiot who would be fixing it.

 

If shinobi life had failed Hashirama he always could have used mokuton to go into carpentry and instead be an idiot furniture maker. It probably would have suited him better, in retrospect. Instead he was a furniture maker by hobby.

 

“Oh, right, will do, sweet heart.” Hashirama said with a laugh, completely ignoring the fact that he was calling the terrifying Uzumaki Mito something as endearing and soft as sweet heart. Really, there were times when Tobirama just didn’t get their relationship.

 

Most of the time he didn’t want to, and decided to use that as an excuse to get his mind back on track.

 

“Minato, I’ll be expecting that dictionary before the week is out as well as the translations to those _wizard_ novels.” Tobirama said, glancing at the boy, “Also, expect to be assigned a long term D-ranked mission to come here and help translate for our _English_ friend.”

 

“Yes, nidaime-sama.”

 

“Wait a minute? Why is Minato doing all this translating? I’m the one who actually speaks native English. Not to mention the guy was found inside of my brain!” Lee pointed out, appearing completely oblivious to the fact that on seeing her for the first time, the man had tried to attack her.

 

So instead he simply said, “Yes, but I don’t trust you.”

 

Lee’s mouth dropped open, looking somewhat offended, offended enough that Tobirama added the caveat of, “It’s nothing personal.”

 

“Well, if that’s all he’s willing to say for now you might as well leave and return to whatever it was you were doing.” Tobirama said, doubting they’d get any further with him, it’d probably take a few days and at least some understanding of their language before he was willing to talk to them again.

 

“I’ll leave too then, take the kids with me. Maybe actually finally get some training in.” Jiraiya said, standing and handing his cup of tea back to Mito.

 

He then motioned to the children for them to stand, “Come on kids, let’s get up and get out of here before I have to pin anyone else to the floor.”

 

The children hesitated, glanced at the man then at each other.

 

“Oh, right, well… I guess it’s now or never, Dead Last.” Lee said looking at Haru Matsuda with a rather pointed expression.

 

The boy paled, then flushed, then paled again, “I… Um… Do I have to?”

 

“Do you want to walk up trees?”

 

“I don’t really mind not walking up trees.” The boy said, waving off her concern, “Really, I’ll get it eventually.”

 

“Come on, Dead Last, don’t fail me now!”

 

“I really… I mean, I really don’t want to…”

 

“If we never did things that we didn’t want to do then we would never get anywhere at all.”

 

“Then why aren’t you doing it?!”

 

“Because after watching my brain ninja squirm underneath Jiraiya for like, five minutes, I can’t handle anything else right now.” Lee said, as if this was a perfectly reasonable thing to say.

 

“Look, squirts, I think it’s time we get out of everyone’s hair and…” Jiraiya started only to be cut off by a rather insistent and somewhat frightening Eru Lee.

 

“This is very important, Jiraiya-sensei, the fate of Konohagakure might depend on it!”

 

“Alright, fine, just try to make it quick, Lee-chan.” Jiraiya held up his hands in surrender, looking from Hashirama, to Tobirama, to Mito, and then to the man who was looking at this scene with raised eyebrows. Which, grudgingly, Tobirama thought the man better get used to it because he hadn’t seen anything yet.

 

He hadn’t been subjected to the severe whiplash of Hashirama’s extreme mood swings.

 

“Come on, Dead Last, just do it. It’s like a band aid, an extremely important band aid that everyone should be concerned about, you just have to rip it off and do it.” Lee said, leaning into the boy’s personal space with all of her chakra focused on him.

 

“Alright, fine, fine!” The boy took a breath, swallowed, glanced at Mito then at Hashirama, then swallowed again and said, “Um, shodaime-sama, you um… Your wife is… Uzumaki Mito is pregnant with a giant fox.”

 

Tobirama blinked, blinked again, watched as Jiraiya sat back down without a word, and then blankly told his genin students, “Well, I guess we’re not going anywhere after all.”

 

* * *

 

All he could think, as he watched these bizarre foreigners (one of them bursting into tears and then grinning like his brains were addled by a spell in the next moment, another an irritated unholy offspring of a vela and a vampire, the red headed woman somehow looking perfectly in her element despite the chaos surrounding her, the larger white haired man just staring blankly ahead looking like he’d rather be anywhere else, the adolescent Eleanor Lily Potter’s hands flying everywhere as she animatedly explained something about the woman and… something large and refused to believe whatever explanation the adults cut in with, the brown haired boy sitting in terror of her as if she was a dark lord, and the blonde staring directly at him with unnerving intensity) was that he had absolutely no idea what was going on.

 

And that he didn’t like it at all.


	14. I'm Supposed to be Good at Shogi

_In which Minato frantically works to finish both the dictionary and his translation of Tolkien J.R.R.’s “The Lord of the Rings” by the nidaime’s deadline, Lee and Shikaku reenact “The Seventh Seal” while Lee questions the strength of her own convictions, and there is a glimpse into that transient backstage world beyond Eru Lee’s sight and mind._

 

* * *

 

Lee’s fingers stalled on the flat wooden shogi piece, surveying the game that she hadn’t been taking seriously up until that point, and all at once there was a feeling of vertigo of seeing chess instead of shogi and feeling grains of sand beneath her feet than the Nara compound’s wooden steps.

 

“Something wrong?”

 

Lee blinked, that tilted feeling of vertigo leaving, and stared once more at the pieces to a game that she was clearly going to lose.

 

Not that this was surprising, Lee had never really had the patience for chess or shogi for that matter, it was such a confined game of strategy after all and true there was a certain art form to that but more and more Lee had come to suspect that you could never truly know all the rules and possibilities of the games you played.

 

Never the less, “I’m supposed to be good at shogi.”

 

Lazy Nara, the most logical and rational person Lee knew, did not seem to agree with this statement if his raised dark eyebrows were anything to go by. Still, he would play against her, which was indicative enough that Lee wasn’t a total lost cause. Of course, sometimes she felt like he went through the motions of playing; like playing shogi with someone was simply a way to steer them into a certain avenue of conversation.

 

In the good old academy days shogi had never really seemed to be about winning or losing.

 

“I’m sure many people are supposed to be good at many things.” Lazy Nara retorted, arms crossed, still waiting for her move with his usual tactical patience when it came to shogi (because while sometimes Lazy Nara didn’t play shogi to play shogi that didn’t mean he didn’t play to win).

 

That was undoubtedly true, but Lee didn’t mean it like that. She wasn’t actually sure what she had meant it like, just that… She was supposed to be good at shogi, no, at chess. She didn’t necessarily know why this was the case but it felt unquestionable none the less.

 

Which, well, sort of brought up why Lee was here today. Not so much the chess thing, that was a new and alarming thought, but everything else so far. Things seemed to be heading back to normal, sort of.

 

Uzumaki Mito apparently was this thing called a jinchuuriki and was supposed to have a giant fox in her stomach, except this was supposed to be secret. Did Lee necessarily buy into this theory? No, but now that Konoha wasn’t going to be devoured by the shodaime’s demonic chakra fox offspring, or at least everyone else seemed to already know about the shodaime’s demonic chakra offspring Lee was more or less off the hook when it came to dealing with it.

 

Sort of. That just seemed like a disaster waiting to happen.

 

Uchiha Mikoto seemed to be dealing with her clan problems, or at least, she hadn’t come up to Lee again. So some progress had to be being made on that front.

 

And well, Lee was finally training again, and there no longer was a ninja inside of her brain. Although she wasn’t really sure how she felt about the fact that he’d been carted off to the Senju compound instead and that Minato was going to have to go up there basically every day he didn’t have a mission to translate. And that Lee wasn’t allowed to because “reasons”.

 

But the team was back together, they were training again, and they might even get to go on a mission soon. Probably their last one before they had to buckle down and prepare for the chunin exams.

 

Of course, chances were that mission would involve plant zombie assassination, which Lee wasn’t at all looking forward to; if not worse. Maybe that would be when Mikoto’s fox baby of doom would break free of his prison and devour them all. Then Lee would have plant zombies and giant chakra fox monsters to contend with. It would be like an unholy combination of Predator and Godzilla, only with much less Arnold Schwarzenegger, choppers, and giant lizards.

 

Which sort of brought Lee back to the very odd day she’d been having today.

 

Namely, a day which she had off, but Minato didn’t (since his translations were technically due by the next morning to the Senju compound) and one which allowed her to have far too much time on her hands.

 

“Hey, Lazy Nara, what do you think happens when you aren’t looking?”  

 

Lazy Nara’s eyebrows raised just a little higher, “Lee, are you going to move your piece or not?”

 

He didn’t get it, of course, she should have figured. Minato seemed the only one who ever really got it the first time, but even then sometimes she’d have to elaborate, everyone else… Sometimes they never managed it, “No, Lazy Nara, I’m being serious.”

 

“And I’m beginning to seriously think that you didn’t come here to play shogi,” her old classmate quipped, looking disapproving, as if he hadn’t known that she had no intention of getting into a high stakes game of shogi with him on a sunny afternoon.

 

And Lee would seriously kick Lazy Nara’s ass if he didn’t take her seriously. In all seriousness.

 

“There’s a rhetorical question, where I come from, from _England_ , I mean. If a tree falls in the woods, and no one’s around to hear it, what sound does it make?”

 

“I assume the sound trees usually make when they fall.”

 

Lee leaned back from the board, crossing her arms with a sigh, and gave up all hope of playing her move until the conversation resolved itself. Lazy Nara seemed to take that as a cue to sip on more tea, muttering under his breath (yet still loud enough for her to hear), about how troublesome it was to try to get in a decent game of shogi with anyone outside of his clan.

 

“That’s not the point of the question. It’s about reality and perception. Namely, can you assume that reality persists when you yourself are not there to perceive it.”

 

Or, perhaps more pointedly, if you stopped believing in it would reality go away?

 

“I would hope so.” Lazy Nara responded, before pausing and looking at her more critically, “What’s brought on this line of questioning anyways?”

 

“Funny, I always assumed the opposite.” Lee said, staring flatly at the board, counting down the number of moves until check on a game that really wasn’t chess for all of their similarities.

 

“The opposite?”

 

“Descartes postulated that the only existence which you can verify is your own and God’s. I think, therefore I am. By thinking, I have been given the ability to think, therefore something must have created my own existence and ability, therefore there must be a god. Everything else… You can neither confirm nor deny.” Lee paused, stared out into the streets of Konoha, into the strange world which she had found herself in so many years ago, “The world isn’t really a rational place, oh it makes convincing arguments in its own defense but… I never really believed in it. If I don’t see the tree fall why should I be convinced that the tree exists? Reality is hardly consistent; it’s what I’ve always believed.”

 

Ironically enough, Lazy Nara was beginning to take her seriously. He probably had to begin with, after all he agreed to play her, in spite of stating that he was still rather miffed about her abandoning the hospital when he went out of his way to dump her there in her hour of need. Still, all pretense of a simple game of shogi between friends had vanished, and he set his tea to the side.

 

“I can’t say I agree with that statement.”

 

Lee shrugged, willing to concede his opinions to him, and not willing to get into the argument about how while reality was inconsistent it was also extremely relative. Not to mention Lee could technically neither confirm nor deny Lazy Nara’s own existence, let alone the existence of his opinions and their validity, “It isn’t about what you believe or even what I believe. Although, that’s kind of why I came here today.”

 

“I thought you were bored and Minato was busy.”

 

That was also very true, also very true was Minato was more than busy, but was also over caffeinated and mildly terrifying as he scribbled his way through “The Two Towers”, cursing both Saruman and Sauron between every sip of cheap black coffee when he really should have been cursing the nidaime’s ridiculous parameters for what had to be the worst D-rank mission ever.

 

That had nothing to do with Lee’s latest existential crisis though. Although, really, Lee had gotten over her existential crisis years ago; back in the cupboard with the Dursleys when she’d realized that the world was a giant cosmic joke that had forgotten its own punchline and settled instead on uncle Vernon’s purple face and giant mustache. Now she was having, well, whatever the opposite of an existential crisis was.

 

Where you were trying to decide if maybe reality existed after all. Or, if not that, then maybe it was a little more complicated than you gave it credit for and things really did happen when you weren’t looking.

 

That or completely give up on any semblance of a connection between events and lose all ability to discern what was true and what was blatantly ridiculous.

 

“You’re the most logical person I know; what do you make of the existential conundrum we must all face at some point in our lives?”

 

Lazy Nara considered this for a moment, then asked, “Well, Lee, what do you think everyone gets up to when you’re not looking?”

 

* * *

 

“...Kushina, I think you’ve had too much ramen.”

 

Mikoto wasn’t quite sure she could believe it but she was pretty sure she was seeing it. Sitting at Ichiraku’s, staring at Kushina’s wobbling tower of empty bowls, Mikoto watched as Kushina hunched over herself looking almost green.

 

In other words, Kushina was doing a pretty good reenactment of Lee’s death through poisoning only a few weeks before.

 

“No, not possible… Can never have too much ramen.” Kushina’s head hit the table, her hands clawing at the wood, “Believe it.”

 

* * *

 

Minato stared at his hastily written, almost illegible, copy of the “The Two Towers”, not yet daring to glance at the mess that was the beginning of “The Return of the King”. His fingers were still shaking, he needed food badly, Lee had disappeared sometime at least an hour ago (although maybe more as he’d sort of lost track of time somewhere in there) and there was no chance in hell that Minato was going to get this done by the next morning.

 

He wasn’t entirely certain of what he’d gotten done today even, as he had caught himself falling asleep in the middle of the sentient tree meeting, only to have nightmares of his own experiences with walking plant men.

 

It was officially time for English cursing, “ _Jesus Christ._ ”

 

Not a very strong one, he could have used worse, that said there was something about foreign swearing that was just so appealing. Or at least, it had been, back when English had been that odd little skill that Minato had that no one really cared about. A neat way to converse with Lee without anyone listening in; probably more useful than that, but there’d always been something else to do and now…

 

Well, now, they were all paying for it.

 

Or, rather, Minato was paying for it.

 

And “The Lord of the Rings” wouldn’t be the end of it either, neither would the dictionary, because looking up to the wall Minato couldn’t help but notice just how many books transcribed by Lee were up there. Many of which he hadn’t read, and many of which didn’t involve shinobi or wizards, but enough that were close that he’d probably have to start on them next.

 

Soon it would be “Star Wars” complete with metallic, automated, puppets as well as those strange dancing bear creatures from Endor. Then, soon after, it would be White T.H’s “The Once and Future King”. Then after, it might be books that appear to have nothing to do with the topic, but ones which Lee had labeled as important and were not to be ignored.

 

Looking at the shelf, that thing he had passed by every day without even a glance, he couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed.

 

Sighing, he put his own work away, set his translations to the side, and walked idly over to the shelf, perusing through Lee’s English handwriting of titles both familiar and unfamiliar for how many times Lee might mention them in any given day.

 

Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, Blade Runner, Star Wars: A New Hope, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, I Claudius, The Once and Future King, The Hobbit, Dirty Harry, The Good, The Bad, And the Ugly, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Predator, Alien, Kung Fu, The Terminator, Terminator: Judgement Day, The Castle, 1984, Animal Farm…

 

Many of them, not even books but instead transcriptions of screen plays and sketches of fantastical lands, far off places, and strange metallic cities filled with humanity and their replications.

 

So many, that he’d wondered how she had managed to see them all in only four years, and how so many of them had managed to stick with her years later so that she could still quote them off and on.

 

“But would he have picked these books?” Minato asked himself, his fingers stopping on the worn spin of “Blade Runner”, taking it out of the shelf and flipping through the detailed pictures of women smoking in the shadows, wild eyed puppets in the rain staring into the orange glow that was the sky, and the elusive dancing lights off the Tannhauser Gate.

 

Minato barely knew anything about the man. He claimed to be an exorcist, or at least, that was what Minato’s rough translation of the English curse breaking must be. He claimed to be from England, his accent certainly was similar enough to Lee’s as far as Minato could tell. He knew Lee… Twelve years later and he still knew her.

 

But all the same Minato thought, that if it was that man instead, who had found himself in an unfamiliar land with disconnected from his history and culture, he would not have picked these books and films to carry with him.

 

He seemed to take the idea of wizardry, of magic, far more seriously than Lee did while taking the idea of reality, and questioning what it means to be human, far less.

 

He flipped towards the beginning of the book, to that first scene, to the sketch of two men in a smoky room, the blinds closed, one man staring into a magnifying lens, a machine recording every twitch he made.

 

“You’re in a desert, walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden you look down…” Minato muttered to himself, reading through the halting interrogation transcribed. Lee would have asked that, she would have repeated the scenario of a tortoise in a desert word for word.

 

Minato hadn’t even asked the man’s likes, dislikes, hobbies, and dreams.

 

Of course, he didn’t seem like the kind of man who would answer those sorts of questions. Not in an interrogation chamber but probably not outside of it either. He seemed like the sort of person who would give you exactly what you wanted, who would tell you the likes you thought he should like, the dislikes you felt he should dislike, and of course the dreams that you yourself held.

 

He realized, all at once, that he was smiling down at the page, at the thought of Lee in that room instead of him. Completely baffling the man with her questions that didn’t really sound like questions at all.

 

And of course, asking about the man’s mother.

 

“Of course…” Minato sighed, his eyes straying back to the table, and the haphazard scattering of papers and books he’d left there along with his rapidly cooling coffee, “I still have to somehow finish that book by tomorrow morning.”

 

* * *

 

“Hey Oro, I have the day off today and well… No offense, but you look like you kind of need a day off, so why don’t you and I go hit the market and see if any of Konoha’s lovely ladies will accompany us home tonight?”

 

Jiraiya, not the person Orochimaru wanted to see the least, but not anyone he was eager to see right now either. Of course, at the moment, Orochimaru was hardly eager to see anyone. He stared up towards the door, blinking as Jiraiya switched the lights on and looked at Orochimaru’s lab with raised eyebrows and sheepish concern plastered all over his face.

 

Jiraiya had always been an idiot, particularly when it came to hiding his feelings, he was such an expressive man as he’d been an expressive child. Everything was loud, eccentric, over the top, like his life was some grand comedic show which everyone took part in.

 

Of course, Jiraiya had gotten better at his act with time, refined his perverted tendencies to something truly impressive, but none the less there was more truth to Jiraiya’s expressions and actions than any ninja should feel comfortable with.

 

“Okay, so you have not been good then. Great, that is… great…” Jiraiya said, stepping carefully over the remains of discarded clones which Orochimaru had yet to clean up either on his own or through Manda, trying desperately not to look horrified at seeing duplications of his own student littered in pieces over Orochimaru’s floor.

 

Orochimaru simply glared at Jiraiya, willing him silently to go away and leave Orochimaru alone, he’d never had a problem doing it before after all.

 

“Seriously, Oro, this is beyond not healthy. We have gone from not healthy, into, well… Your laboratory is going to fuel my nightmares.” Jiraiya finished rather weakly, grimacing, funny that only since these were clones, only since they were entirely inconsequential, was this even allowed.

 

Not only allowed, but endorsed, endorsed in a way that no other research that Orochimaru would ever propose would have been. It was quite the hypocrisy, to look at the remains and pretend that this wasn’t what everyone had wanted.

 

“I have no interest in accompanying you to, ‘pick up women.” Orochimaru finished with a sneer, finishing glaring at Orochimaru only to turn his attention to the distant wall, one he had been staring at for longer than he had been counting.

 

Jiraiya paused, stared down at Orochimaru, and out of the corner of his eye Orochimaru watched as Jiraiya’s expression stiffened and became stony. It was an odd expression for his face, one that was quite rare, and perhaps more intimidating for it. If only Orochimaru was capable of being intimidated so easily, “It’s not about getting laid, Oro. Look, you need to get over… whatever this is.”

 

“Whatever this is?”

 

“Yes, this…” Jiraiya motioned to the lab then to Orochimaru himself, “You, whatever’s wrong with you. Look, I was there too, I’m her sensei, believe me when I say that I’m not exactly okay with Lee being… I don’t even know what! But you have to move on, not just you, but me, Sakumo, Tsunade… everybody. We all have to get over it!”

 

Get over it, the clone had more or less said the same thing, of course it said quite a bit that Eru Lee’s clone was more eloquent and had more tact than Jiraiya.

 

Still, he found himself amused almost against his will, “I would, ‘get over it’, Jiraiya, if my issue with Eru Lee was so simple as that.”

 

Jiraiya raked a hand through his hair, “It’s not simple! None of its simple! You think everyone else is having a great time out of all of this? I know I’m not.”

 

He barked out a harsh laugh, his eyes catching on one of the clones, and hastily jerking his gaze away, “You know, these clones still get to me. Sure, I stuff it down, compartmentalize it… We ninjas are great at that compartmentalization shit, man. Anyways, it didn’t bother me for a while, but now after I’ve seen her actually, well, dead… It doesn’t matter that it’s not permanent, except it does, because now I get to reevaluate how to teach her. Except I don’t want to. She shouldn’t become expendable, become the automatic meat shield, the bait, just because she’ll get back up from that blow. That’s like, it’s like killing someone one inch at a time. Thankfully we found that shinobi inside of her brain so I get to push all of those decisions off for a while. But that’s just me.”

 

Jiraiya began counting off on his fingers, “I know Tsunade’s still in shock, luckily for her it seemed to shock her out of her depression over Dan and Nawaki but… But one of these days you know she’s going to ask about them, ask Lee, and you know that’s not going to be pretty. Sakumo, well, I’ll be honest and say I have no idea how he’s handling it. I think he might be panicking, he’s probably panicking right about now. Even Minato-kun, the most… lee-sensitized of us all, isn’t exactly on his A-game when it comes to Lee’s immortality technique.”

 

Jiraiya left that hanging in the air, stared at Orochimaru, implying all of the rest. That none of them were quite ‘alright’ but then that was what shinobi did, they coped, and they repressed and they moved on. Because if you didn’t, as a field nin, then the moment you found yourself distracted you were dead.

 

How ironic would that be, to get himself killed over Eru Lee, perhaps it might even be a fitting end.

 

However, that wasn’t a thought for Jiraiya, there was only one thought for Jiraiya, “Why are you here?”

 

“Are you serious, Oro?” Jiraiya asked, motioning again to their surroundings, “You’re a hot mess.”

 

Orochimaru winced at the wording, because while accurate in a pedantic sense it was also not imagery he’d like associated with himself, “That’s not what I meant, idiot, I meant… Why are you here?”

 

For a moment Jiraiya looked confused, then it seemed to dawn on him, and hesitantly he answered, “I… Well, I’m your teammate, Oro.”

 

A slow curling smile worked itself onto Orochimaru’s lips, “When it suits you.”

 

And it hadn’t, for years in Ame it hadn’t, Orochimaru had come back and Jiraiya hadn’t. Shortly after Tsunade had abandoned the village entirely, a missing nin in all but name. He’d stayed behind for three orphaned brats to ease his conscious, as if somehow training them to survive the coming years would make up for the fact that they had failed, and that Hanzo was still well in control of Amegakure.

 

Jiraiya said nothing for a moment, just stared at Orochimaru, and then, “I was always going to come back. I didn’t say it, I know, and maybe I didn’t think it at the time but… I will always, and have always, been a part of this team. If I left, I’d expect you to haul my ass back, just like I hauled Tsunade’s ass back and I’d haul your ass back if you decided to become an unofficial missing nin.”

 

It hadn’t felt like that back then, but then, he’d been so relieved when Jiraiya had returned through the gates. He hadn’t said it, had called Jiraiya an idiot for taking so long in backwater Ame, but never the less some desperate knot inside of him had loosened at the sight of at least one of them returning from the wilderness.

 

And here Jiraiya was now, in spite of his lack of comfort, in spite of the fact that he probably would rather pick up some kunoichi spurred on by alcohol and bad choices, he was still here in the physical manifestation of Orochimaru’s pit of despair complete with the dead bodies of his own student.

 

Still, all the same, “You are an idiot.”

 

Jiraiya spluttered, “Hey, I’m helping you! I don’t have to be here, you know, and frankly I don’t want to be because this place is…”

 

Jiraiya blathered on, ignoring Orochimaru’s suppressed smile of amusement, perhaps the man was right, perhaps Orochimaru had spent too much time in here. Of course, that hardly meant he was over it, that the festering resentment he had growing towards Eru Lee had disappated, but none the less.

 

Why not?

 

“Alright, Jiraiya, let’s go see if you truly can manage to get laid in the course of one evening.”

 

* * *

 

“So, grandpa, how is… not being dead?” Tsunade, when she was younger, had never really imagined that there would come a time where she would go for a drink with grandpa Hashirama. Of course, Tsunade, while an enthused gambler enabled by her loveable grandfather, hadn’t quite been old enough for drinking at the time.

 

Not to mention that even if Madara hadn’t killed him he would have been way too old for that sort of thing by the time Tsunade had hit her drinking years.

 

Of course, that was before the universe decided to turn on its head, or before Konoha was invaded by an alien, or before Eru Lee descended from the mystical land of England to thoroughly screw with Tsunade’s family tree.

 

Something Tsunade still hadn’t quite gotten a handle on, if she was being honest, just like she hadn’t quite come to terms with the fact that she was apparently staying in Konoha in spite of all of her convictions not to.

 

Still, it was a strange world she was living in, where she and her grandpa were sitting in a bar at noon drinking way too early in the day. Of course, given that they were shinobi, there was usually somebody in the bar at noon justifying themselves with the obligatory, “It’s five o’clock somewhere, jackass.”

 

She just didn’t expect that to be Hashirama with the girliest drink she had ever seen in her life.

 

It was one of those pink, brightly colored, flavored sake things with a little umbrella inside of it, that was to appeal to your sense of color rather than anyone’s sense of taste.

 

“Well, not too different from not being dead, the last time I mean… Before I died.” Hashirama said, between sips through a brightly colored swirly straw.

 

Tsunade couldn’t help but feel it was probably a good thing she’d decided to reconnect at noon in a bar, because if this sort of thing happened at six o’clock, well, Tsunade wasn’t quite sure how Konoha would have handled it. The academy textbooks’ history sections conveniently forgot a lot of Senju Hashirama’s eccentricities in favor of his general badass-ness. Of course, they hadn’t thought he’d rise from the grave to contradict them.

 

“Right, should have figured that one… I really sort of meant, how are you?”

 

“Oh, right, of course you did,” Hashirama said with a rather embarrassed laugh, looking more embarrassed than her, “Well, I’m um, I’m actually really enjoying myself. I mean, it’s still a little weird… I don’t think I’ve ever had this few responsibilities before. It’s kind of nice, but also very strange and a little unnerving.”

 

“Like what?”

 

“Oh, well, I’m not hokage anymore. That’s one thing. The village is built, pretty firmly too, which is another whole thing. You know, people said I was crazy.” His eyes flickered towards her, processing how she took this, because he hadn’t really talked about that with her before he’d died. She’d been a bit young but also, also it’d all been so fragile then, he probably hadn’t wanted to tempt the gods.

 

“Really, they said I was a mad fool. We’d been fighting for centuries, why was I so convinced that we could stop now?” He trailed off after the question, his eyes growing distant, an unusually nostalgic expression growing on his features.

 

“You were right.” Tsunade said, and for a moment a flicker of doubt crossed Hashirama’s features.

 

“Well, about some of it… I wasn’t right about Madara.” He offered her a small pained smile, took a large swallow of his ridiculous drink, and then grinned like he’d never mentioned anything heavy in the first place.

 

“But really it is a wonderful place, and so nice to see it coming along after all these years. You know, I’d always wanted to have a time machine, or convince Tobi to make some time travel jutsu and travel to the future just to see what it all looked like. So, in a very strange way, I actually got my wish.”

 

A wonderful place, after hashing it out with gruncle Tobirama Tsunade wasn’t quite willing to broach that subject, because Nawaki and Dan had also been convinced that Konoha was a wonderful place. So filled with possibility and so different from that era of clan wars they had pulled themselves out from.

 

Would he still think that if he had met his grandson?

 

“So, you have any plans, now that you’re back with the living?”

 

“Well, I was kind of hoping to be put on the missions’ roster but… Well, that apparently would start a third shinobi war. So I’m not going to do that.” Hashirama grinned rather awkwardly, a sheepish uncertain thing, that made him look way younger than he had any right to look. Sage, it was like the man never made it out of his teenage years.

 

“No shit.” The peace they’d just won for themselves was hardly lasting, Uzushio still screamed inside of it along with Ame. Something as small as the shodaime and nidaime showing back up, taking missions, probably could start an avalanche that would lead into the almost inevitable third war.

 

“I was hoping to take less… controversial missions anyway. Small things, delivering messages, escorting clients to other villages. Maybe in a few months, when the other villages are a little less edgy…”  


Tsunade burst out laughing, almost spewing her drink onto the counter, “You want to deliver messages? You, the shodaime hokage, god of shinobi, want to perform C-rank genin missions?”

 

“Why not?”

 

Good god, he actually looked offended.

 

“You are way overqualified for that shit, grandpa.” Tsunade said, “That sort of stuff is for baby genin.”

 

“Well, maybe I could take on students.” Hashirama said, waving a hand dramatically and almost spilling her drink off the counter, “I’ve always wanted students. Never could though, not with being clan head, and then being hokage… I barely had enough time to offer pointers to Hiruzen.”

 

This was at least slightly more plausible but it didn’t stop Tsunade’s bout of hysterics.

“Oh, go ahead and laugh Tsunade-chan,” Hashirama huffed before adding, “It hardly matters anyway for the moment, I’m not going anywhere anytime soon. Not with that English shinobi hanging around and not until Mito finishes training Kushina-chan…”

 

He trailed off, staring into the shallow pool that remained of his drink, while Tsunade’s laughter and good humor ebbed away. He looked… small, he was taller and broader than Tobirama, but that didn’t make him Jiraiya either. All the same, the force of his charisma, his boundless energy and enthusiasm, it always made him seem bigger than he was.

 

When he was quiet he seemed terribly small.

 

Unspoken between them was the glaring truth that Uzumaki Mito, Tsunade’s own grandmother, had one foot out the door.

 

And there was one question Tsunade had to ask, the one she hadn’t dared to ask herself you, wasn’t quite sure why she hesitated but hesitated all the same for boundaries you couldn’t and shouldn’t cross, “Are you going to ask Eru Lee for help?”

 

Hashirama looked up from his reflection and smiled at her, a pained knowing smile, and said quite clearly, “No.”

 

“Why not?”

 

He sighed, laced his fingers together, and continued, “She wouldn’t be very happy, if I went mucking about with her life like that. Mito is also quite terrifying sometimes so…” Hashirama offered her a rather weak grin before a grimmer expression crossed his features, “And Mito doesn’t belong to just me, she also belongs to her clan, and I won’t separate her from them for my own borrowed time.”

 

“But what if she doesn’t want to…” Tsuande trailed off, not finishing her sentence, gripping her glass of sake far too tightly.

 

“She would have brought it up already.” Hashirama said quietly, “War is a terrible thing, an unfair awful thing, and it takes so much from us… If I ask for her back, Tsunade, then where do I stop? Where can I allow myself to stop? Because if I make her stay then surely I have to bring back Uzushio, and if I bring back them I should bring back Itama, Izuna, and Madara and everyone we’ve failed all those years ago, and then we bring back our fathers, and their fathers and then I bring back their enemies and their fathers… And what do we do then?”

 

“Then the world would be different anyways.” Tsunade replied.

 

Hashirama shrugged, “Maybe, it’d be different certainly, but how could we let our children grow if we keep bringing the past back with us. What about those people who wanted to leave, who sacrificed themselves for their cause and their people, do I make their choices insignificant? Not to mention, how can I put all that on the shoulders of one twelve-year-old girl?”

 

“I don’t think I can afford to be that selfish, Tsunade-chan.”

 

* * *

 

“You winning that staring contest, Tobirama?”

 

Tobirama looked away from the English shinobi, the exorcist, to find Mito watching him from the doorway with raised eyebrows. Looking at him like he was Hashirama caught in his latest ridiculous antics.

 

Tobirama tried and failed not to let his irritation with this whole situation show.

 

Namikaze Minato needed to finish that dictionary yesterday.

 

“We ran out of things to discuss.” Tobirama said rather tersely, which was true enough.

 

The man, Voldemort, a strange and almost unpronounceable name, had gone through the motions of basic conversation. He’d greeted Tobirama with a slightly accented good afternoon, had pointed at various objects asking for vocabulary here and there, and Tobirama had done the same but then they’d hit the small easy topic wall and hadn’t been able to hurdle themselves over it since.

 

After all, Tobirama was hardly going to get into interrogating details about foreign fuinjutsu without a firm grasp of English himself and at the very least without a translator present. And the man, for his own part, seemed unwilling to break into anything more complicated lest he rock the boat a little too hard.

 

There were small things that Tobirama had begun to notice about the man, easier seen outside of an interrogation cell. He was unnervingly calm about his situation, patient, always opting to wait and see no matter how tedious he might find something. He also gave only the barest indications of his true feelings in any given moment, only small minute twitches of his lips, the tapping of his fingers, a glance out of the corner of your eyes…

 

He had none of the tells of being trained in this art, as many kunoichi had been and a fair number of shinobi, but all the same there was a sort of practiced grace to his act that was a combination of raw talent as well as many years of employing it.

 

His smiles, for example, were not the empty smiles that even truly experienced ninja (those who excelled in battle rather than infiltration), that flat twisting of the lips but instead something that closely resembled a true smile. Where his eyes, his cheekbones, every part of his face mimicked the expression. It was far harder to tell than it should have been, that the man didn’t mean it at all.

 

What sort of a man could wait this easily, in a foreign land, without access to his chakra, under virtual house arrest by a stranger who insisted on discussing the theory behind fuinjutsu and every other aspect of your training, even while you know that the girl who you sealed yourself into almost a decade before was wandering out of your sight somewhere in the village?

 

Why did he seem perfectly content to sit here and play along with Tobirma’s schemes? Why hadn’t he tried to make a break for it yet?

 

Now with Mito staring at the man and the man at Mito Tobirama couldn’t help but wonder just what the man had managed to glean from the situation. After all, Tobirama already knew quite a bit about this man.

 

He was an excellent mimic, he had a great ear, often able to repeat phrases from Tobirama perfectly after only hearing it once. He was also highly intelligent, regarded himself as being highly intelligent, and seemed frustrated by not only the chakra suppression seals but also his own inability to understand Tobirama. As if by merely conversing with Tobirama plainly would have already turned the field to his advantage.

 

More, he was not a taijutsu expert, barely proficient in it. The body was new, yes, but he didn’t move with the efficiency that one could expect from even a genin. However, the man didn’t scream back room R&D either. No, he was most likely a ninjutsu expert, fuinjutsu by his own admission, and beyond that Tobirama would be willing to guess that the man would employ genjutsu and kinjutsu to his own advantage.

 

If Tobirama could see all that in him then what had he gotten from Tobirama, from Hashirama, and even from Mito now standing in the doorway staring at them.

 

“Well, you look like you’re regretting this whole decision.” Mito commented, jerking Tobirama out of his thoughts and into the present moment.

 

“Not regretting simply…” Tobirama trailed off, cast a glance to the man, and offered Mito a rather tight smile, “He’s a little too good at this and a little too bad at this for my liking.”

 

“Don’t like having it both ways?” Mito asked rather drily, dark eyes sliding over to the man and eyeing him speculatively. The man simply stared back, looking a bit uncomfortable with the attention, but only looking uncomfortable beneath that façade he was as cold and calculating as ever.

 

This… exorcist.

 

“Right,” Mito finished for him before smiling at the man, “Good after noon, I’m Uzumaki Mito. We met the other day.”

 

“Good afternoon, Uzumaki-san.” The man replied, offering her a small nod of the head, something he had picked up from Tobirama earlier.

 

“Oh, you’re good.” Mito said, and for a moment the man blinked, processed the words, then offered a small smile.

 

“Thank you, Uzumaki-san.” Not said with quite enough humility, respect for Mito’s position as the wife of the shodaime, but certainly close. Eerily close without prepping from Tobirama on how important Mito was. 

 

Mito turned back to look at him, “Oh he’s very good, I can see why you’re unnerved.”

 

Not quite good enough went unsaid, of course, the man would discover this soon enough. Tobirama was honestly surprised he hadn’t already, but with each passing minute he would notice Tobirama’s lack of reaction followed by Mito’s and even Hashirama who tended to believe the best of everyone, and then Tobirama was undoubtedly sure the façade would change once again until finally it was dropped altogether.

 

And he wondered, as he stared at this pale eyed, handsome, foreign man, just what rested beneath.

 

* * *

 

“That son of a bitch.” Sakumo, tearing off his mask and storming into the streets in more typical jonin garb, couldn’t quite suppress the wave of killing intent as he worked his way back home to where Kakashi was.

 

Of course, he normally wouldn’t go home feeling like this, he didn’t want Kakashi’s early childhood tainted by Sakumo’s work more than it already was. Kakashi was already such a serious little boy and there were only a few years left before he started the academy; Sakumo wouldn’t take these easy years from him.

 

But he got such limited time with Kakashi as it was and he didn’t think he’d calm down even after a few hours stewing over this.

 

Danzo had finally made his move.

 

Oh Sakumo had known he would, had expected it much earlier, but with Jiraiya as the girl’s sensei and the hokage all too willing to let the girl progress at a normal rate Danzo hadn’t had an opportunity to get his hands on her and drag her into the depths of ANBU and firmly under his own thumb.

 

And true, so far he hadn’t truly made any overt moves, just a single strange offer and introduction to a hospitalized Eru Lee. One which, if Danzo knew the girl at all, should have known would fail miserably as Eru Lee was tempted by anything other than power and prestige but he’d made the move all the same and Sakumo was seething.

 

He knew how this would go.

 

Danzo would insist, after the girl made chunin, that she be inducted into ANBU, a waste of resources to let her be a simple field agent no matter the expertise she might gain. Besides with his personalized training the girl should be grateful that Danzo displayed such blatant interest in her.

 

And if he realized what she was truly capable of…

 

Sakumo hadn’t planned to approach her before the chunin exams, after all she had only just become a genin, not to mention just come to terms with her rather… alarming blood limit. However, that said, it appeared as if time was running out. He’d have to make a bid to the hokage to have the girl as his apprentice, maybe giving her a year or two more with Jiraiya and her genin team, before Danzo could convince the sandaime otherwise.

 

And perhaps Sakumo would truly have to be convincing. Because in a way she was ideal for ANBU work, between her clones, her ability in genjutsu, and now her immortality, there was perhaps no individual with more potential to be an ANBU agent.

 

But at the same time he thought the sandaime knew what a disaster it would be to place that much power into Danzo’s hands.

 

Still, stopping at his door, he couldn’t help but laugh. He wished he had been there, in that hospital room, watching Danzo make what he probably thought was the start of his spider’s thread pulling the girl in. Using everything she’d ever desired against her, her ambition, her talent, only to have it thrown back in his face because he did not get Eru Lee at all.

 

From the ANBU rumor mill it sounded like the two hadn’t even managed to participate in the same conversation.

“If only he’d offered her a lifetime supply of instant ramen…” Sakumo said with a shake of his head, almost pitying, but not quite.

 

He’d have to make his own moves soon, but if Lee stayed stubbornly Lee, well, then he had nothing immediate to worry about.

 

* * *

 

“…Yeah,” Lee said after a moment’s thought, “I’m going back to thinking that everything just kind of stops existing when I stop paying attention to it.”

 

* * *

 

The Two Towers

By Tolkien J.R.R.

Translated by Namikaze Minato

Also translated by Eru Lee after she found Namikaze Minato suffering the infamous caffeine crash that he’d dutifully put off for at least twelve hours

 

Excerpt:

 

“And they were but three hundred assorted men and elves facing the mighty orc horde of Saruman deep in the Land of Horse’s final stronghold. And they waited, and waited, and threw the axe wielding dwarf into the mob, and the orcs sieged, and they waited some more, and one of the elves died and it was very sad, but then they kept waiting and sieging and it wasn’t looking good at all. And finally the wizard Gandalf showed up at the last minute with the banished Horse samurai thus proving that while wizards are never late nor early they also have pretty awful timing and are kind of assholes. But it was still awesome.”


	15. Don't Move, Don't Even Blink

_In which Tsunade makes a bet that she actually has a decent chance of winning, Jiraiya offers some general life advice to his young students, and through a strange set of circumstances the MacGuffin reveals itself to the unwitting team seven._

* * *

 

So far, so good, Jiraiya thought to himself as he and the kids walked behind the perfectly oblivious civilian merchant couple as they made their way to Suna.

 

The sun was shining, the grass wasn’t green as they were on the desert road at this point, the kids looked a little sunned out but still had a decent amount of energy, and so far nothing had attacked them.

 

Which was very good, for one thing it meant unthreatened genin and normal C-rank mission status (because Sage, if all of these C-ranks started turning into A-ranks it wouldn’t do wonders for his stress levels), and more it removed the threat of Lee dying and then resurrecting herself this close to another village. Or, well, Lee doing anything close to another village.

 

The last thing he needed was to have to haul Lee’s ass back to Konoha if Suna saw what kind of blood limits they were missing.

 

And from personal experience with some of their nastier poisons Jiraiya knew that, for all that you didn’t want to mess around with another village’s jonin, you really didn’t want to mess around with Suna’s.

 

But even more than that, he needed this mission to stay calm, because otherwise he owed Tsunade a shit ton of money.

 

“Pray for me, Tsunade, I’m taking the brats on another C-rank.”

 

On the eve of the third C-rank for team seven, which given its low ranking should have only the standard bandit level of danger associated with it, but given the luck of his unfortunate team and their missions thus far would probably have enemy regenerating assassin jonin packaged in with the rest, Jiraiya took one final shot to calm his nerves.

 

Perhaps one shot too many, since he’d gathered his S-rank secret drinking gang together, otherwise known as the sanin plus Sakumo, but a very necessary shot as it could be the last one he ever had.

 

Or, perhaps not the last one he had, he’d made it through that fight with Hanzo after all, but maybe the last he ever had as a jonin sensei with three non-mained students…

 

Tsunade gave him a rather dry and unimpressed look, “And what, Jiraiya, am I supposed to pray for? A chance of rain?”

 

“How about a lack of plant zombies, I would greatly appreciate that,” Jiraiya practically spat, because really, he’d almost be tempted to give up his porn collection if it meant he didn’t have to deal with plant zombies.

 

Well, maybe not that desperate, still, he’d give up something important.

 

“Plant zombies?” Sakumo asked with raised eyebrows, “I’m not sure if I’ve heard this one.”

 

“Trust me, Sakumo, it’s not even worth telling.” Jiraiya said with a shudder, really there wasn’t much to say, just that every time Lee seemed to step out of the village there were plant zombies trying to kill her ass.

 

Now, if this meant that there was some other Mokuton user out there, some stray Senju bloodline exploited by another village who had somehow caught wind of Eru Lee, and they had somehow managed to get through Konoha’s defenses was anyone’s guess. Even more alarming, and perhaps more likely, was that there was a leak somewhere inside of Konoha, and it was high up in the chain of command.

 

Either way, it was deeply alarming, and even distracted by Lee’s immortality, the English shinobi, and more he still thought on it every once in a while, and wondered who the mole could possibly be.

 

“I know, Princess, how about a normal, uneventful, regular, C-ranked mission. One without plant zombies, without any kind of zombies, preferably without any dead people at all.” Jiraiya said.

 

Tsunade harrumphed then waved a hand to the other two, “Why not have these two assholes pray for you, if you’re that concerned? Getting me to pray for you is probably like getting me to bet on your behalf.”

 

Well, one, Orochimaru didn’t look like he was in any mood to pray for Eru Lee’s good fortune. He was still, weirdly competitive and bitter about all of it, even if he now stepped out of his laboratory willingly, without Jiraiya needing to go in and intervene and see way too much of Orochimaru’s personal life for his own peace of mind.

 

That, and, well, Orochimaru was the kind of person that, if he did decided to pray to the gods in desperation, they’d probably do the opposite just to spite him.

 

Two, why have Sakumo pray for him when the gods were far likely to take a beautiful woman’s praying far more seriously? If the gods didn’t look down on her breasts in wonder, then Jiraiya would eat his hat.

 

Still, “That’s a good idea, actually, I’ll bet five ryo that we don’t run into an army of zombies, plant or otherwise.”

 

Sakumo almost spewed his drink, and Orochimaru gave out a longsuffering sigh and gave Jiraiya a withering glare, Tsunade just looked unimpressed, “That has to be the dumbest bet I’ve ever heard of.”

 

“Well, Tsunade, he does have to live up to his reputation as the village idiot,” Orochimaru cut in snidely, because he was an asshole like that even when, by all rights, he should be Jiraiya’s wingman.

 

Jiraiya completely ignored him, “Come on, Princess, it’s in your favor. I have never, and I mean never, run into plant zombies before this whole mess. I’ve never even heard of plant zombies before this whole mess! And here we’ve run into them twice already, that’s not a coincidence! Sakumo, in all of your super-secret ANBU work have you ever heard of plant zombies?”

 

Sakumo glanced at him with a musing sort of expression, “Well, normally I can neither confirm nor deny that sort of thing, but I feel as if it’s safe to say that I’ve never heard of run into plant zombies.”

 

“See, and he’s in ANBU, they deal with all the weird shit! There’s some sort of a…”

 

“Plant zombie conspiracy?” Orochimaru asked, a bit too sharply to be dry, but still with that condescending tone to it.

 

“Exactly, a plant zombie conspiracy behind all of this! Someone is pulling the strings, and they’re not going to hesitate just because this is the third time.” Jiraiya said, then added, “Plus, it’s five ryo, that’s barely anything!”

 

“Fine, make it my bar tab and we have a deal.”

 

Jiraiya held up his hands in defense, “Whoa, Tsunade, I’m not made of money.” 

 

“Five ryo is a joke.” Tsunade scoffed, “That’s barely even a real bet!”

 

“It’s only a joke because you drink like a fish and gamble like a…” Jiraiya didn’t get to finish that thought, because Tsunade didn’t slap, no, she punched, and when she punched she punched you through your own furniture and wrecked your cabinets without even bothering to look apologetic.

 

“Bar tab, Jiraiya, or no dice.”

 

And so, Jiraiya ended up betting Tsunade’s no doubt overwhelmingly large bar tab, and while he was pretty damn sure Tsunade would lose (because in spite of all laws of the universe Tsunade always lost a bet), he also couldn’t help feel a little edgy given the green team seven’s track record as well as his new financial incentives.

 

It was as if the cosmic forces of Senju Tsunade’s eternally terrible luck were battling against Eru Lee’s fate and reality defying entropic force. Only time, and this mission, would tell which was more powerful.

 

As it was the kids were a little more dubious than he was.

 

None of them were openly saying anything, not in front of the civilian couple, but Lee and Minato were certainly going at it in muttered English. Which was a really weird thing to hear, as they usually didn’t do it so loudly or so often, and must have been truly bizarre for the civilian couple to witness.

 

Jiraiya almost wished they’d stop but then, he apparently needed to get on that learning English bandwagon too, by hokage mandate at that.

 

Because that was another thing he got to deal with as soon as they were back, that English exorcist shinobi that they’d found inside of Lee’s brain, which Jiraiya just did not have the mental capacity to think about now.

 

(Those Ame orphans, despite coming from a war-torn village, and their deep distrust of Konoha shinobi, seemed so rosy and uncomplicated in retrospect. He hoped he’d be able to swing by there someday, it was unlikely with Hanzo in charge and genin of his own now, but perhaps in a few years when things had changed…)

 

“Jiraiya-sama, thank you so much for accompanying my husband and I on our journey. It’s such a dangerous world, these days.” The wife of the merchant gave him a kindly, rather maternal, smile.

 

He grinned back, “No problem, madam, it’s a great honor to be able to keep you and your husband safe.”

 

And potentially use you as bait for undetectable plant zombie assassins or Suna ninja should they decide to push the envelope and take Lee for themselves. Suna wasn’t as grabby as Kumo, they were a bit more strategic, and dare he say it, honorable than that. That said, Lee’s bloodline was the kind that villages might gladly go to war over.

 

(And he’d realized it at some point, during one of the many briefings with sensei that he’d had since Lee’s accident in the woods, that they didn’t need some diplomatic incident or anything else to spark the next war.

 

All it could take, all it might take, was Eru Lee’s mere existence. Because at the end of things, if the bijuu and jinchuuriki could lay foundations for war, why couldn’t Lee?)

 

“And the children, they’re in training, yes?”

 

“We’re genin, madam.” Haru supplied, even as Lee and Minato finally stopped chattering to pay attention to the woman.

 

“Genin, that’s the younger ninja, right? Oh you’re so young, but then you ninja seem to get younger every day. Was that some sort of code you two were practicing?”

 

Lee opened her mouth to answer but Jiraiya quickly beat her two it, “Not quite, nothing that sophisticated. Just a toy language the kids made up when they were younger.”

 

And with that he gave Minato and Lee a withering glance that would have given him away if they were closer, but without any Suna nin immediately nearby could serve as the less than subtle reminder that they weren’t in Konoha anymore and that you didn’t pass out information like that like free candy.

 

“All by yourselves? That’s rather impressive, isn’t it.”

 

Minato offered a polite smile, “Not that impressive, madam, just something to pass the time.”

 

Something to pass the time, that was what Jiraiya needed, or at least something to calm his nerves. He was getting way too introspective for his liking, he didn’t even like thinking politics for the most part, but here he was thinking about war and other villages on what was supposed to be a rather routine C-rank mission.

 

Still, they were close, even moving at civilian pace they weren’t doing too badly, on the last legs of the journey really. From there on out, after dropping the pair off at the gates, they were hightailing it back in the other direction.

 

Normally he’d weasel his way into getting a temporary visa for the day. Now with the war over, and negotiations drawn up once again, Suna had become a technical ally. Jiraiya hadn’t had a look inside of the village in a very long time, really since the beginning of the second war when he himself had been a genin, and it would be good to check out their markets, their supplies, and just the general feeling inside of the village.

 

However, that would be if he was willing to tempt fate and bring the kids inside of the gates of another village, no matter their dubious allegiances (Konoha had only ever had one true ally, Uzushio, and it no longer existed).

 

And there they were, in the distance, the great gates of Sunagakure, carved into the very cliffs themselves.

 

The kids stopped, stunned as they stared at it, because while Konoha was impressive that was home. They saw it every single day and thought nothing of it. It was the first time seeing another village, seeing it rise out of the mist, the mountain, or the wind and sand, that it struck you what great wonders you were seeing.

 

And with an eye towards the sun he sighed in relief, they would make it by midmorning, that was more than enough time to make it out of the desert by dark.

 

* * *

 

“Alright kids, let’s hurry it up and get out of here before it gets dark!” Jiraiya stretched, already walking away from the gate, and the scowling guards they’d left behind.

 

Lee still glanced at her shoulder, back over towards the village that they hadn’t even had a true glimpse of, before looking back into the horizon where Konoha waited unseen, “We aren’t going to visit the village?”

 

“Well, things are still a little tense. So not yet, we’ll leave that to the hokage and whoever’s dealing with diplomacy. You’ll be back for the chunin exams though, they’re being held in Suna this year, now that the war’s over.” Jiraiya said with a grimace, before adding, “Besides, the sooner we get back the sooner I can breathe a sigh of relief.”

 

There’d been a certain tension to him the whole time, from the day before when they’d picked up their clients and stayed with them in the inn, to this very moment where they walked away with the mission technically accomplished and all the desert still stretching before them.

 

Of course, Lee was too, her eyes had been searching the dunes for them from the very beginning.

 

“Aren’t we allied with Suna?” Minato asked

 

“Yes, that’s why the chunin exams will be there but… War is complicated, I’d hesitate to say that any of the villages were on our side. Suna was, technically, but it was an alliance of convenience rather than any true bond. Of all of them, it was Uzushio that we had the greatest ties to.”

 

Complicated, Lee hadn’t paid much attention to the second shinobi war, since it had wrapped itself up just before she and Minato had become genin, but that seemed to be a good if understated term for it. The second war seemed to haunt most of the adult generation, and it sat in the shadows of the younger ones, particularly in Uzumaki’s.

 

She’d say something about this but Lee wasn’t really in the mood, still keeping an eye out for that distinctive glimpse of white, something that could come from any of the seemingly infinite directions of the desert.

 

By her side, Minato’s eyes also scanned the horizon, his mouth twisted into a grimace, perhaps taking this more seriously than even her. After all, since that last time, and the confession of her death, then her death right in front of him… Well, things had gotten more than a little serious.

 

(And he’d even asked her about that, in English, on the way over. Amidst talk of the English shinobi left behind in Konoha, the hospital, Mikoto, Danzo, and everything in between. He’d asked if it hurt, dying.

 

She hadn’t said it didn’t.)

 

“Well, I’m just glad we haven’t been attacked by plants.” Dead Last said to fill the tense silence.

 

“Too soon, Haru-kun,” Jiraiya said with a wince, “Let’s wait until we pass through Konoha’s gates.”

 

Lee spared Jiraiya a look then, moving her eyes from the shifting waves of sand, “I could teleport us back, if you think that’s a better idea,”

 

“After the last time, no thanks.” Jiraiya said with a grimace, before adding with a more contemplative look, “Besides, that’s not a great idea this close to Suna, they may not have anyone trailing us right now but with that amount of chakra, even the short-distance sensors will pick up something odd.”

 

This time it was Minato who turned and looked at Jiraiya questioningly, “Why not?”

 

“I was going to spare you this talk until we started training for the exams but I suppose now’s as good a time as ever. It’s best not to give your abilities, especially your greatest abilities, away so easily. Don’t sell yourself too short, but always keep your aces up your sleeves for when you really need them.”

 

“I don’t think teleporting is my greatest…” Lee started, but Jiraiya held up a hand before she could finish.

 

“You’re a bit of an exception, in that you have at least a dozen A to S ranked techniques as a genin, which normally wouldn’t even be possible. Let’s pretend you have only one of those techniques, like… you only have teleportation. You don’t want to go giving that away in the chunin exams or even before the exams. Because believe me, you know what’s going to be written under your pretty face in the bingo books?”

 

“Teleportation?” Lee guessed.

 

“Teleportation,” Jiraiya confirmed, “And despite how comparatively shitty your taijutsu is people are going to take techniques like that extremely seriously. And you will have every single shinobi above the rank of chunin looking for your face in the field.”

 

Minato cut in then, looking curiously calculating, the look he normally got when thinking of shogi moves or thinking truly deeply on a subject, “What about Haru and I?”

 

“It’s a little different for you two. Off the top of my head I can’t think of single techniques that put you above and beyond, like Lee’s do.”

 

Jiraiya waived a hand back to where Minato was walking, “Minato-kun, your taijutsu’s more than decent, you have maybe one B-ranked ninjutsu technique under your sleeve, and I’m planning on starting you all on elemental jutsus when we get back so you may get something more there, especially if I start adding in the basics of fuinjutsu into the mix, but right now the threat you pose is how you use what you have. You don’t have any single instant-kill, blow their sandals off, super devastating techniques like Lee-chan does. So, you probably don’t have to worry as much and can focus on impressing people, versus Lee who absolutely has to tone it down.”

 

“Tone it down? What’s that supposed to mean?” Lee asked, feeling a little startled, because while the chunin exams had always been looming on the horizon there hadn’t been words like ‘tone it down’ thrown around before.

 

“It means that you’re going to have to pretend to be a normal genin with normal, non-blood-limit, abilities.” Jiraiya said, with more irritation than Lee really appreciated.

 

“I’m not sure I know how to do that, sensei,” Lee groused, because she really didn’t, she hadn’t paid attention to what normal genin were capable of. On the top of her head she couldn’t even recall if most of them were capable of anything.

 

“No teleportation, no grabbing jutsu, no making things out of thin air, no Lee-clones, no transforming jutsu, no raising the dead…”

“But that’s everything!”

 

Jiraiya looked over his shoulder with a barked laugh, “Hey, welcome to the real world! Besides, I didn’t say anything about your overpowered genjutsus, did I?”

 

No, he hadn’t, but he’d made sure to say it about anything else Lee had used that was remotely useful. Jesus, what did that even leave? Henge, normal people clones (which Lee had never really gotten the hang of anyways), maybe breathing fire at people like Uchiha Fugaku and Uchiha Mikoto could do, walking up trees, but any other techniques were escaping her.

 

Genin, well, they didn’t seem capable of anything really.

 

As Lee was reeling over the monumental task that the chunin exams had just become Dead Last asked, almost hesitantly, “Um, sensei, what about me?”

 

“Oh, uh,” Jiraiya awkwardly paused, and in spite of the fact that he was walking forward, “Well, Haru-kun, you should be fine and should work on impressing the hokage and everyone else watching as much as you can.”

 

“So, I don’t have any overly powerful techniques or abilities I should worry about then, do I?” Despite this being a question, it was strangely rhetorical and defeated sounding, and glancing over at Dead Last Lee found that he was almost glaring at the back of Jiraiya’s head.

 

For a moment Jiraiya said nothing, then said, seemingly out of the blue, “Did you know that I was the dead last of my class?”

 

None of them answered, none of them had really pictured that, especially considering that Jiraiya was one of the strongest ninja in the village, but he went on anyways, “Not just last, mind you, but dead last. And I was put on a team, like you guys, with the best kunoichi, and best shinobi graduate. In other words, I was put on a team with that grumpy ambitious heartless bastard Orochimaru, and the heavenly Senju Tsunade-hime, granddaughter of the shodaime hokage and grandniece of the nidaime hokage. And they gave me so much shit, still do, actually.”

 

It was hard to picture what the younger Jiraiya must have looked like, not because he was old, but because he seemed like such an adult figure to Lee. It was like he’d always been a jonin, had always been a member of the sannin (even when it just the ninin with him and Orochimaru), and had always been someone capable of being their sensei.

 

The idea of him in the academy, even as a genin under the sandaime, was baffling.

 

“I was an orphan, didn’t have any special techniques, no prior training to the academy, didn’t even take the academy nearly seriously enough, no support from a clan, nothing. And yet, here I am, third member of the sannin and S-ranked badass. So, Haru-kun, just because you can’t walk up a tree doesn’t mean you won’t turn into a super awesome ninja.”

 

Dead Last considered this for a moment, a flicker of doubt appearing on his face, but then he sighed and said, “I’d just prefer to turn into someone not dead.”

 

“Yeah, well, that’s a good dream too.” Jiraiya said with a shrug, clearly life-mentored out for the moment, “Still, soon as we get back Haru, you know you’re being put through the ringer. We’re going to get you walking up that tree if it kills you.”

 

“But not really, right sensei?” Dead Last said, now uncertain and paling a little.

 

At which point Lee suddenly remembered her own promise to Dead Last, “Oh, right, don’t I owe you that, Dead Last?”

 

“What?”

 

But Lee remembered, despite all the recent hassles and general weirdness, she’d made Dead Last a deal for a few favors, “No, I do owe you tree-walking. Remember, that was the deal for the whole you talking to Mikoto thing and warning the shodaime.”

 

Which he had done surprisingly well at, better than Lee had expected, far better, showing more talent there than he ever had with being a ninja.

 

“No, Lee, that’s um… That’s really not necessary,” Dead Last said, wincing, and looking at her warily as if it was her intervention that just might kill him, rather than plant zombies or the chunin exams.

 

“Bullshit, you still can’t walk up a tree!” And now Lee was almost offended, because really, at least Lee was trying to help him. All those other things he was, rather legitimately, concerned over would actively try to at least incapacitate him and remove him as an obstacle (lethally if that was the easiest way to go about it).

 

“Lee, if he doesn’t want your help maybe you should…” Minato started but Lee interjected before he could finish.

 

“I made him a deal, Minato, I’m not about to back down!”

 

More, she’d made him a promise, and Lee wasn’t the kind to go around breaking promises like that even if Dead Last got cold feet about it.

 

“Let’s try the old-fashioned way first, okay?” Jiraiya said, holding up his hands, failing to point out that Dead Last had been trying and failing at the old-fashioned way for months now, since they’d first gotten into this team seven business.

 

It was then, with a sigh, that she returned her attention to the great sand dunes for signs of both giant sand worms or else plant zombies or perhaps plant zombies riding giant sand worms. Neither appeared, instead the desert seemed to stretch on forever, as if it might as well cover the entire planet but then…

 

It was a sense of something fractured, something slightly off balance, like there was something that should be there that wasn’t and something hastily pasted over top of it. It felt like a flicker of reality, there one instant, gone in the next.

 

Lee stepped forward, towards it, staring harder, willing it apart, pulling apart the thin veneer that disguised it and then, in the sunlight, something in the distance glinted.

 

“Sensei,” she said, pointing, “There’s something behind those dunes, something with metal.”

 

Jiraiya turned, looked, stared for a moment, brought his arms together and muttered ‘kai’, and then took a deep breath and said, “Shit.”

 

For a moment, it looked as if he was debating going out there, a decent way off the beaten track for a civilian but not nearly far enough for an uninterested shinobi, but then his expression hardened and he spared a glance for them, “Alright kids, behind me, and stay sharp.”

 

Then he was running, her and Minato, then Dead Last (the slowest of them all), following behind. And before they even knew it they were all standing on top of a sand dune, staring down at the battered form of an unknown shinobi without a headband to place him, and the golden box he clutched against his chest.

 

And Jiraiya repeated in that same frustrated tone as before, staring down at the man, “Goddammit!”

 

* * *

 

“Yo, missing nin, you look like you just walked through hell and back,”

 

Minato stared down at the man, eyes flickering to Jiraiya, who hadn’t moved from the top of the dune with them. His hands though, they were still even as they were at his side, steady and all too ready to come together and start blazing through hand seals.

 

The hands of a gunslinger, as Lee might say.

 

The man beneath them, dark haired, dark skinned, dark-eyed (looking not like he was from Wind country but not like he was from Konoha either, instead some third further place than that where he should have had no business being here), twisted his head painfully and glared at Jiraiya with swollen eyes.

 

Minato had never seen anyone look this bad before.

 

It wasn’t like spars from the academy, where broken bones and bloody noses occurred every now and then, these injuries went beyond that, were deeper and darker and had a look to them that projected how close to death the man was.

 

Minato knew, without even having to ask, or to blink, that he was staring at a man that would soon be dead.

 

(And he saw Lee, Lee poisoned, sweat dripping down her face, staring up at him in an unseeing daze, and then not staring at all as she slipped out of this realm and into the pure world with soft and silent footsteps…)

 

“Konoha ninja, the toad sage, aren’t you?”

 

Jiraiya didn’t nod, didn’t give a cruel smile, gave no indication of any impression. Instead his expression was just as grim as Minato’s and the rest, the unspoken thought that it would be Konoha’s ninja giving this man his funeral and witnessing him claim his unmarked grave, “Nice to hear I have such a fancy reputation. That said, not sure I know of you.”

 

“You wouldn’t,” the man shuddered, collapsed in on himself, and began coughing, clutching the box tighter.

 

“Kumo?” Jiraiya asked, but the man gave no indication of answering, only the whiteness of his fingers from gripping the box too hard.

 

“Not that it’s any of my business, but what’s a Kumo missing nin like you, doing in the middle of Suna’s desert beneath one hell of a genjutsu bleeding to death like this?”

 

“You’re right, toad sage,” The man gave a weak smile, a self-derisive one that fed off of pain and misery, “That isn’t any of your business.”

 

Jiraiya spared the man a look then glanced back towards where the road waited, carefully maintained against the desert storms, “You know, if you die, that genjutsu is going to fail completely.”

 

“The seals…”

 

Minato glanced down and noticed seals, painted in blood on the sand, crudely painted and jagged, nothing at all like the smooth curves of those written by the nidaime. They flickered, sputtered with glowing chakra, but already seemed to be fading to Minato’s inexpert eyes.

 

“Those seals of yours aren’t going to last thirty minutes.” Jiraiya cut in, and by the expression on the man’s face he knew it too.

 

The man looked out over the horizon, out into the desert, his eyes looking out past everything, searching for something.

 

“It doesn’t have to end like this. Come back with us to Konoha, talk to T&I for a little bit, tell them your story, and…”

 

“No, no, I won’t go to a village,” the man said, before taking a shuddering breath, still looking away from them, “I can’t go to a village,”

 

For a moment, Jiraiya stared and said nothing, and it was Minato who said, slowly, carefully, because for all that he had grown up in Konoha and heard stories of other villages and knew of his own family’s trek out of the desert, he had never seen it personally for himself, “Konoha isn’t like Kumo,”

 

The man’s smile returned, and slowly, painfully, with a great cry he sat up and stared at him all, “But it is, genin, in all ways that matter. Do you know why you haven’t heard of me, toad sage?”

 

Now that the man was sitting, the box placed carefully to the side, still touching it but no longer in a death grip, Minato could see that there were fresh blood stains on his tunic, beneath his ribs, and that the red stain was still spreading, “Until a week ago, until this last mission, I was not a missing nin. I wasn’t even in your bingo books as a Kumo shinobi to be concerned over, perfectly average… At least, I was...”

 

“Until you picked up the box,” Lee finished for him, and the man’s eyes darted to her, lingered for far longer than they should have, his hand once again covering the box almost instinctively, but then he forced himself to relax, and said, “Yes, until I picked up the box.”

 

“Do I want to know what’s inside the box?” Jiraiya asked, almost unwillingly, looking like he was dreading it.

 

“The destruction of that very village you’re so unnervingly loyal to.” The man offered them a grim smile, “Trust me, I would have destroyed it if I could.”

 

“But you can’t…” Jiraiya said.

 

“I already tried, and then I ran out of time…” The man’s attention drifted again, back towards the horizon, and he said (almost under his breath so that it could not be heard), “They’re coming.”

 

Minato looked out towards the horizon where the man was staring, unwillingly thinking of that night and the glowing yellow eyes of the regenerating plants wearing the shape of men, and wondered just who it was he meant.

Because surely, if he meant the Kumo hunter nin, he would have said so already.

 

“Then don’t wait for them, come back with us, we’ll take you inside the village, hell, we can drop you off along the way, you don’t have to die out here…”

 

And the man just watched Jiraiya, as if he’d never seen anything quite like this before, and a slow look of realization dawned across his features.

 

The man closed his eyes, took in a deep breath, and grabbed the box once again, and for a moment his hands trembled and the box shook violently, but then he held it out to them, “Take it. You have to take it, take it somewhere and hide it, destroy it, get rid of it. Don’t take it inside your village, tell no one you have it, and don’t let them find you.”

 

“I don’t even know what it is! I don’t even know who they are! Seriously, I can patch you up and if you can hold out long enough Senju Tsunade is back inside of Konoha…”

 

The man stood up with another cry, stumbled forward, up the dune, pushing the box up the sand towards their feet leaving a trail of red behind and underneath him, “Listen to me! I am finished, even if I live they’ll kill me when they realize just what I’ve given away. I can’t protect it! But you, you can, and you will. Take it, take it into the desert, seal it, get rid of it, do something…”

 

The man froze, paused, turned to stare out into the horizon, Jiraiya’s eyes followed his, and Minato’s did too, but he couldn’t make out anything, human or otherwise, all the same he stared and stared almost willing something to come into focus.

 

The man fell back, tumbled down the dune, his limbs twisting painfully, and then he smiled. This one was different though, it wasn’t pained, it wasn’t grim, instead it was strangely calm, almost serene, and as he twisted his head towards the sky one last time it looked as if there was something more than the endless blue reflected in his eyes.

 

Then, before any of them could move, he took a kunai from a pouch on his belt, and stabbed himself through the jugular.

 

Lee stepped forward, almost tumbling down but Jiraiya held her back, even as they all watched transfixed as the man’s body jerked and blood spurted from his neck, until finally, there wasn’t anything left inside of him at all.

 

“… I can still bring him back.”

 

Jiraiya looked down at Lee, something glinting inside of his eyes, and he said, “No, Lee, you can only bring them back if they want to come back.”

 

Minato swallowed drily, his eyes locked on the man, and he wanted to say something about dishonoring the dead and ensuring that sacrifices weren’t in vain. How this man had clearly used his life as his last card to ensure that Jiraiya took the box, not only took it, but sealed it away like he asked.

 

And how, if Lee brought him back, then everything he’d gone through, everything he’d said to them now, would be meaningless.

 

Jiraiya, carefully, picked up the golden box, he brushed off the blood that had beaded on its surface, and slowly handed it to Lee, “I’ll need you to hold onto that, until we’re in Fire Country’s borders.”

 

Then, without a word, Jiraiya brought his hands together and went through a series of seals, and the man beneath them burst into flames. Without waiting for the flames to die out, for the man to turn into ash scattered in the desert wind, Jiraiya turned and tugged on Minato’s arm along with Haru.

 

“Come on, kids, we’re behind schedule.”

 

And they turned, and they left.

 

* * *

 

“Well, I’ll be damned, there are a bunch of assholes tailing us,”

 

The sun was just about setting and for the first time in hours they had stopped, no longer in the desert and instead at the edge of a small town halfway between Suna and Konoha. Haru, staring forward, could make out the welcoming light of the inn, the lights inside lit to stave off twilight and the coming darkness, and the shadows of the buildings stretching and blending with the shadows of the great trees.

 

Jiraiya grimaced, not staring out into the distance as the other man had, but instead squatting on the ground and placing three fingers into the dirt, eyes closed.

 

Lee and Minato watched this, both looking as wary as Haru felt, Lee clutching the box tightly in her hands.

 

“Lee, I’m going to need you to make duplicates of this box, as close as you can to the original. The look, the feel of it, the chakra, even the taste and the smell. Can you do that?”

 

Lee nodded, set down the box, concentrated on it for a moment, her eyes seeming to take in every detail of the golden surface and then take it apart again, and then within a blink of an eye there five new, identical boxes.

 

“Good, you even got the senchakra in it.” Jiraiya said, not explaining what senchakra was or why it was important that Lee duplicate this.

 

Jiraiya rolled up a sleeve, revealing a dark painted seal, then picked up the original box and pushed it inside, then, he took three different scrolls from his belt, unrolled them to reveal similar looking seals, and stored a box into each one, he then left one final box out in the open, handing it back to Lee.

 

He then tossed one scroll to Minato and one to Haru.

 

“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to send a message to the hokage telling him we’ve run into a bit of trouble, nothing serious, but nothing I want to drag with us back into Konoha. Just letting him know to expect us tomorrow rather than tonight.” Jiraiya said, “In the meantime, as far as they’re going to know, each of us has an equally likely chance of carrying the box. They’ll suspect me the most, but they won’t put it past me to put the real one on one of you and plant the red herrings on myself. In the meantime, we’re going to figure out what the hell it is I’m carrying, and if I really can’t bring it back into Konoha.”

 

“That man seemed very serious,” Lee said, staring down at the box with a strangely sober expression on her face, one that Haru had seen there before, but one that made her look so much older than she really was.

 

“Serious enough to run halfway across the map only to die bleeding in the desert.” Jiraiya agreed, “Even if he came from an enemy village, if he was willing to trust me to get rid of this for him… I’m not going to disregard that.”

 

“He’s from Kumo though, what if it’s some sort of a trap?” Haru asked

 

“Lot of effort for a dumb trap, Haru-kun. Wanted to get rid of me? Easier ways to do it. Wanted to get rid of Lee? More straight forward ways to do it. Wanted to infiltrate Konoha? It would be easier to do that if he was still with the living.” Jiraiya’s eyes drifted to the replicated box, “No, this is ringing many alarm bells for being weird.”

 

“He seemed very insistent that we get rid of it,” Minato said, and at that they all fell silent, Haru thinking back to watching that man die… It was the first person he’d ever seen die before. It was…

 

He knew he would see it, someday, as a shinobi it was something you lived with. But all the same, it hadn’t been like anything he’d ever imagined.

 

“Yes, and that has me really worried.” Jiraiya said, his eyes narrowing on the replicated box, as if it might as well be the original. “Especially that he trusted a Konoha nin to do it for him.”

 

Jiraiya breathed out, stood, stretched out his back to a symphony of clicks and pops, then, bit his thumb and wiped the blood onto a scroll.

 

A giant toad appeared in a puff of smoke, eyes half lidded, red and striped, wearing a dark untied kimono, and looking entirely displeased (as much as a frog could look displeased), “Jiraiya, you stupid punk, you better have a damn good reason for this,”

 

“I do not have time for this today,” Jiraiya said under his breath before taking a larger breath to say, “Gamabunta, look, I need you to deliver a message to the hokage for me. Tell him that the kids and I have gotten a bit waylaid with some unseen complications and that we’ll be in tomorrow, rather than tonight.”

 

Gamabunta, as he was apparently was called, didn’t look impressed by this.

 

“If it wasn’t important I would have pawned this off onto someone else, two minutes of your time, seriously.” Jiraiya paused then, and there was a feeling of thickness to the air, of that sharp and cold shinobi intent, and then, “Seriously, Gamabunta, I will owe you for this.”

 

And without a word the toad was gone from whence he came, a puff of smoke covering his absence.

 

“Well, I guess that explains the toad sage comments.” Lee commented drily.

 

A summons, that’s what those were called, Haru thought, of course he’d never really thought all that much about summons and really didn’t know all that much about them but…

 

“Come on kids, I don’t want to be inside of a town when we open up whatever’s inside of this thing.” Jiraiya said, and with a jerk of his head, motioned for them to walk through the streets, past the inn, and back onto the forest road and then taking a sharp left from it and deeper into the woods.

 

Great, off the beaten track, that didn’t make Haru feel any better about this. Really, nothing was making him feel better about this. It had gone from bad, thinking it was all going to go off the rails at any moment, to worse.

 

And now he was carrying a fake box of… something, along with Lee, Minato, and Jiraiya, with someone on their tail, and it was all something that might be too dangerous to take inside to Konoha.

 

And he just remembered how he could never really explain to his family just why he was so nervous, if the missions were to dangerous, if he felt Jiraiya wasn’t givin him enough attention. It was just, it always seemed to spiral out of control so quickly.

 

Lee and Minato stuck close to Jiraiya, not quite as fast, but never as far behind as Haru was, and he just kept following behind, trying to keep up even as he wasn’t weighed down by a physical box like Lee was.

 

Then the world seemed to slip, the shadows grew darker and longer, and his movements seemed to slow while the others kept moving without him.

 

He reached out for them, about to call out, but then a hand wrapped around his mouth and the edge of a kunai pressed into his neck.

 

Fine red hairs, flew out beside him at the edge of his vision, and a girl’s voice, an all too familiar voice that he’d heard almost every day since his graduation said, “Don’t move, don’t even blink.”


	16. Raiders of the Lost Ark

_In which, after finding himself in an unfortunately familiar situation, Haru loses his shit, Emotional Support Lee makes her brief and mysterious return, Lee battles blood thirsty cultists Indiana Jones style, Minato and Jiraiya sit this one out, and Haru makes very poor life choices._

 

* * *

He should have known, somehow despite the terror and growing pit in his stomach that matched the rising hairs on his neck, all he felt was annoyed frustration because he couldn’t even find himself surprised that this was happening.

 

At all.

 

Even though, had he been on any other team, if he’d just graduated and been put on team ten or eleven or any team but seven, he would have never seen this coming. But he wasn’t on just any team, because he was that much worse than the next runner up to his last position, Nara Shikaku, who spent his entire academy career sleeping.

 

Because after being walked in the opposite direction of Jiraiya, gagged on a strip of cloth that tasted suspiciously of blood, his hands bound behind his back, with a kunai at his neck that with only a little more pressure would sever his spinal cord and leave him paralyzed, he found himself staring at none other than Eru Lee.

 

Eru Lee without any shoes, in what looked like clothing that had been worn for weeks on end through multiple battles (sporting tears, mud stains, blood stains, and more), a good deal thinner, with dark cloth wrapped around her eyes, and sporting a shorter and more jagged haircut (that somehow only intensified her wild curls), but unmistakably Eru Lee none the less.

 

She cut out the gag, pawing at his face for a few moments before finding his mouth, leaving him to spit and gasp for air, and finally have enough to scream what he’d wanted to as soon as he’d heard her voice (because he could recognize her by voice now, and wasn’t that horrifying, just that much of a reminder that he spent way too much time with her), “Goddammit Lee!”

 

Lee stared back with one of her trademark nonplussed expressions, or at least, she tilted his head in his direction with that disapproving pursing of her lips since he couldn’t really see what her eyes were doing, and said in that equally Lee-esq dry tone, “You do know I’m not the original Eru Lee, don’t you?”

 

“I don’t care!”

 

“Of course, you care, Haru,” Lee said with a sigh, pinching the bridge of her nose and frowning, “As much as she frustrates you, and gives the appearance of indifference, you still care about her. If it was her, rather than some unknown renegade clone, you’d be devastated.”

 

“No, I’d be unsurprised! Because this is what happens when you go on missions with Lee! Terrible shit happens to you!” Haru at this point was past giving any shits and made no effort to lower the volume of his voice. Although, his captor, Lee, was making no moves to shut him up either and instead was just tilting her head in his general direction with that same frown as before.

 

Admittedly he hadn’t been stabbed at by plant zombies yet and there were no fires but he wasn’t holding his breath either. As it was being kidnapped by a blindfolded shoeless Lee-clone wasn’t that much better than either of those options either.

 

(Some part of him recognized that he should probably be embarrassed that he had just been kidnapped, without any hassle, by a blind Lee clone but he refused to acknowledge that. As far as he was concerned this was just another data point towards how terrifying Lee really was.)

 

“That’s… You must recognize that it’s not her fault. Sure, things beyond her or your control are centered on her but that’s… That’s not anyone’s fault, Haru. And she doesn’t mean for you to be in these sorts of situations any more than she does for Minato or Jiraiya to be caught up in them. You do matter to her, Haru.”

 

What did she know? All Lee really cared about was Minato and ramen and maybe…

 

For a moment, he stopped thinking completely, there was just white noise in his head as he looked at her, Lee, with that soft smile he’d only seen her use towards Minato, a small reassuring thing that was somehow more human and more real than any of her large grins.

 

And he had the strangest feeling of déjà vu, and with a twisted uncertain and desperately shaky smile he asked, “You’re not… You’re not that clone I met that one time on the bridge, right? The one that jumped off and drowned herself…”

 

Lee, or rather her clone paled, he imagined beneath the blindfold her eyes had grown wide, “Shit!”

 

“Oh my god,” Haru said, still more in shock now than anything else as he took her in, and even though she looked completely different, and significantly not dead, that white noise feeling just kept going.

 

“Alright, Haru, there are two ways to do this, the easy way and the…”

 

“Didn’t you… die? You didn’t come back up,” Haru said, the memories flooding through him as he tried to remember when he’d stopped looking. It’d only been a few seconds before the real Lee had shown up so maybe she could have come up for air further down river but…

 

“Clearly, I didn’t die,” Lee said, as if she found this beyond aggravating, “Are you going to choose the hard way, Haru? Because I guarantee you it will not be…”

 

He interrupted her again, hands twisting against his bonds as he leaned forward wishing he could at least meet her eyes, “But then, why didn’t you just come back? Why did you… jump like that?”

 

Suddenly the clone’s expression, what he could see of her expression without her eyes being visible, softened once again, “I… You must understand, Haru, that it wasn’t about you. And it was thoughtless, and cruel, and not in any way emotionally supportive and I know that but… Goddammit, Haru, stop being so upset about things not in your control!”

 

He leaned back, actually taken aback by that, and the surreal nature of the situation just caught up with him or maybe he was beyond being scared because he was tired, sore, and just so upset, “You committed suicide! You told me how important I was and made me think Lee actually cared and then you jumped off a bridge! How am I not supposed to be upset by that?!”

 

“She does care! She just can’t show it like most people! And believe me, Haru, you’d find the amount of love she has for Namikaze Minato, what she’s willing to do for him, to be beyond unnerving,” She took a deep breath, then said in a calmer voice, “Now would you please stop interrupting, get a hold of yourself, so we can get on with this?”

 

Get a hold of himself? He looked down at himself, felt the rope around his hands, then stared back up at her incredulously, “You kidnapped me! You committed suicide in front of me and then kidnapped me!”

 

“And I’m sorry about that, Haru, you’re just the easiest target and I really need…”

 

No, just no, she was not bringing dead last into this, “Oh, so that’s why? Because I’m Dead Last I make easy pickings. The easy one to get to, rather than having to face one of the sannin, or Lee, or even Minato,”

 

“Haru, that’s not what I mean, please don’t take it personally…”

 

“No, it’s not personal at all, just that I’m terrible at being a ninja and am going to die before the chunin exams even start.” What would his parents say? His mother had never wanted for him to be a ninja, had always been quietly disapproving, god it would devastate her. It would devastate all of them, and where would he be?

 

“Yes! Yes, Haru! Yes, you are the worst of your significantly overpowered genin team. Yes, it’s safer to kidnap you rather than Minato because of how fast and furiously Lee would come after him! Yes, of all of them, you’re the one with the greatest likelihood of meeting an early death.” She stopped, took a deep breath, and in a shaking overemotional voice he’d never heard from Lee before, “But that doesn’t mean that you don’t matter, that they don’t care, and that you can’t try to keep going and keep improving. Even now, as I waste time reassuring you of your own self-worth, I come closer to the moment the genjutsu cracks and Jiraiya and Lee, Lee too, come after me with a vengeance. You are not abandoned!”

 

He hadn’t thought of that, he hadn’t even realized he had been stalling her, unintentionally, and at once the reality of the situation hit him. He had been kidnapped, he had been held with a kunai to his neck and had been marched to what he had thought would be his death…

 

“Oh my god,”

 

The clone stood, drew closer to him, placed pale hands on his arms and held him in place, “Haru, calm down, Haru, I don’t want to have to kill you…”  


“Oh my god!”

 

He could really die here, this could be it, killed by Eru Lee, or well, almost Eru Lee, the only Lee he’d ever formed any real connection with. Was that ironic or was there some other word he should be using?

 

“Haru, all I need is the box, the one Jiraiya took from the kumo nin earlier.”

 

He looked down, to where her eyes should have been, and met the dark blindfold instead, “The box?”

 

“Yes, the gold box, I’ve been tracking the man who stole it from the Jashinists for a week, and I need it, Haru,”

 

“You need it?” He repeated, not really asking, just repeating words, like that might help him understand what was even happening.

 

She sighed, pursed her lips, “I don’t need it, but the man I work for does, or at least, suspects that it might be useful,”

 

“Work for?” Haru parroted dumbly, “Who do you work for?”

 

“That’s not important,” Lee insisted, still holding him, her hands tightening on his arms, “All I need to know is who has the real box and then you can go, that’s all I need Haru, nothing else. Please, don’t make me do something we’ll both regret,”

 

“Why do you want it?” He asked, “What does it do?”

 

“That’s not…”  


“If you don’t tell me then you’ll have to do something we both regret,” Haru finished for her.

 

She pursed her lips for a moment, clearly debated not telling him and instead cutting his throat or something, and then sighed and recounted, “Inside is an object of great power, rumored to be from the original source of chakra itself, the great golden tree, hidden away until one of the Jashinists stumbled across it. Or, rather, we all stumbled across it, since I only got word about it at around the same time they did and the kumo nin who was infiltrating their cult did.”

 

“And whoever you work for wants it?” Haru paused, licked his lips, and then asked, closing his eyes shut and preparing for the blow, “And what do they want with Konoha?”

 

He was met with silence, a heavy weighted silence, and then, “Just tell me where it is, Haru,”

 

Haru didn’t answer right away, instead watched as her hands dropped to her sides, and then reached up to push the blindfold away from her face, and as she did so, with her eyes cast down, he caught flickers of red and black.

 

And without even having to look at it directly, without even knowing how, he knew.

 

The sharingan.

 

“I have it!” He squeezed his eyes shut and cried out, “It’s in the scroll, I have it!”

 

* * *

 

“My bet, it’s the ark,” Lee said, sitting on her own copy of the box and staring at the original in all its ominous glory, that wasn’t glowing so much as still brightly glinting even in the dark. Of course, that could be because of the dozens of seals that Jiraiya was still lacing around it and them as they’d come to a stop but even so Minato couldn’t help but feel that it had an unnatural look to it.

 

“What’s the ark?” Minato asked quietly, eyes darting around the trees for signs of their followers, or else the plant men that they had yet to run into.

 

“The Ark of the Covenant, it holds the ten commandments God gave to the prophet Moses, it also eats your soul if you look inside it,” Lee said quietly back, although not looking as alarmed as her words should have made her.

 

“Oh, that’s…” Great, he wanted to finish, but couldn’t quite bring himself to say, instead he stared with renewed trepidation at the box and then at the seals Jiraiya was still placing down, hopefully making it so that the box didn’t eat their souls.

 

“It could certainly destroy a village,” Lee continued, without prompting, arms crossed as she continued to stare at the box, “God was very big on smiting villages back in the day,”

 

“Smiting?” Minato asked, although he was reasonably sure that this wasn’t the time or place for this conversation.

 

“Sure, he practically destroyed Egypt on Moses’ behalf. I mean there were the locusts, the famine, the Nile running red with blood, then the frogs, then the fire raining down from the sky, and then the death of every first-born son… He really doesn’t pull punches.”

 

“And that’s what’s in the box…” Minato said, slowly, the words uncertain and dubious even as they came out.

 

“Oh, no, that was just because God was pissed because his chosen people were slaves in an enemy village.” Lee said, waving her hand as if this was nothing to be concerned about and was just semantics rather than something that could potentially pointed at their own village, “That’s just one example, anyways, there’s also the one time he got pissed at everyone and flooded every country on the map, killing everyone but this one family and a bunch of animals.”

 

“Well, that sounds like an… English, thing so… It’s probably not that. The ark I mean…” Minato said, hesitantly, really hopefully because that sounded like something none of them were equipped to deal with.

 

“Well, it is or it isn’t… But if it is, remember not to look into the light.”

 

“What happens if I look into the light?” Minato couldn’t help but ask.

 

“It eats your soul… and your skin.” Lee said, adding that last bit as an afterthought, as if she’d only just remembered that part.

 

He then sighed, took another glance around at their surroundings and then… Glanced again, this time with more care, and then again with alarm, “Lee, is something… missing?”

 

“Missing?” Lee asked, then surveyed the surroundings, “Well Jiraiya’s here, so check there, ominous golden box is here, so check again, you’re here, I’m here…”

 

She offered him a short shrug, at a loss at why he was feeling at such a loss, but he was. It was something on the edge of panic, like if he only just realized what was gone…

 

He started patting his pockets, checking for kunai, ninja wire, his own scroll, anything that might be missing but all of that was right where he left it.

 

That feeling though, it grew stronger, his brow furrowed, “Something’s missing, something very important…”

 

“If it’s the plant zombies then I’m not sure I want them here anyways,” Lee commented rather drily, then with a sigh, “Minato, really, the only thing I can think of is Dead Last but that could just be because he’s unbelievably slow…”

 

Minato’s eyes widened and he felt the temperature drop and something, some fog inside of his mind break, and clarity rushed back, “Oh shit,”

 

“What?” Lee asked, head placed in her hands, more distracted than anything else, still watching Jiraiya and the box instead.

 

“Lee, where’s Haru?”

 

“Who?”

 

He turned and gripped her arms, shaking her, and snapped, “Dead Last, Lee!”

 

Lee looked up at him, caught his panicked gaze, and then lifted her head to stare at the clearing they were in, and then looked again, and it was at that point she seemed to catch his own concern, “Well… shit,”

 

They both looked in tandem to Jiraiya, who appeared to be deeply engrossed in his work, so much so that he’d told them when he’d removed the box from his arms that he was under no conditions to be disturbed or else they could all explode.

 

Fuinjutsu, apparently, was not for the faint of heart.

 

Minato bit his lip, he didn’t know much about fuinjutsu but it looked as if Jiraiya not only wasn’t done but also wasn’t close to being done either. He took a step forward then a step back, eyes darting back the way they came in increasing alarm.

 

Lee stood, stared at Jiraiya for a moment and then moved her eyes to Minato and pinned him with a hard-green stare, “You stay with Jiraiya, when he’s done tell him that we lost Dead Last and to come and find us. I’m going back for him,”

 

Minato paled, because she was saying it this time, but the last time she had done this had been on their last mission and…

 

“Lee, you can’t just…”

 

“Minato, I’m immortal, Dead Last isn’t. If I don’t go back then there might not be a Dead Last to go back for,”

 

She couldn’t know that, and even if she did, that didn’t mean she could just go like that without any regard for her own life. He wanted to say that, he almost did, but instead he bit his lip and held it in and watched as she took his silence for acceptance.

 

Like he was okay with it.

 

She turned then, without a word, only pausing she looked back down at her own fake copy of the box and then in a moment of decisiveness tucked it under one arm, “I’ll come back… With him too, I promise, Minato.”

 

And then she was gone, swiftly and silently running into the dark, following after wherever Haru might have found himself.

 

Leaving Minato to his own panicked thoughts and Jiraiya to his work.

 

* * *

 

The trouble with Dead Last, Lee couldn’t help but think to herself as she darted through the forest, golden box pulsing ominously under one arm, was that he was so utterly unremarkable and impotent that it made trying to find him a pain in the ass.

 

Of course, Lee had never really gone out of her way to find Dead Last before. Oh sure, sometimes she’d look for him, but it was usually easy to guess where he might be. Because talentless as he was he wasn’t lazy, and goddamn if he wasn’t doing his best to conquer tree walking.

 

Not that he needed to, since Lee had promised she’d helped, and meant it, but he seemed one of those unnaturally stubborn sort of people who wanted to do everything himself. Which, really, probably got him into situations like this.

 

This being either him being dead, him being mortally injured somewhere, or him being… She didn’t think he’d be the type to get completely lost in the woods, but maybe she shouldn’t put it past him, because really all he had to do was just keep up for ten minutes until they’d gotten far enough away from the small village.

 

Granted at shinobi pace that was a good distance, but still, he was a genin, he could manage that much. (And if he couldn’t then Lee really did need to panic for the upcoming chunin exams, because she was starting to think toning it down was going to be even more difficult than she imagined.)

 

He hadn’t even been carrying the physical box! If anyone had the right to fall behind it would have been Lee who was saddled with the thing out in the open. Of course, that was probably one of the reasons Jiraiya had given that version to her, rather than a scroll, because Dead Last couldn’t be expected to keep up.

A flicker of metal in the dark, multiple pulses of chakra, Lee skidded to a halt and threw herself down and into a roll, clutching at the golden box and maneuvering it so that one foot was placed on top of it as she came back into a standing position finding herself facing five tall, shirtless men, covered in pale scars across their arms and chest along with the occasional blood stain and healing wound, each wielding a rather intimidating looking weapon (from knives all the way to scythes), and several loosely holding what looked like rosary beads in their hands.

 

(Although, as far as Lee had noted, Catholicism and even religion to a point weren’t really a thing in Konoha.

 

Oh sure, there was the occasional sort of Buddhist person, and supposedly a fire temple around somewhere where monks would practice monk ninjutsu, but otherwise when you made your living off the deaths of others and often witnessed all of your loved ones die it was sort of difficult to get into the merciful god thing that had been all the rage in England.)

 

Lee conjured a kunai into one hand, out of thin air, and kept the other open, fingertips spread wide.

 

One of the men, at the sight of the kunai appearing out of midair, grinned at the sight of it. As if Lee’s ability to make matter out of nothing was not only cute but positively made his night.

 

Well, that was certainly a different reaction than what she’d received in Konoha. 

 

“So, I’m guessing you’re the ones that have been following us from Suna,” Lee commented without prelude, eyes narrowing. Not Kumo ninja, either, not any sort of affiliated ninja, which wasn’t what she’d pictured given the man’s story.

 

“We were following the Kumo thief before then from Lightening,” one of them commented with a jagged grin, “Of course, he took his time to meet Jashin, and eventually pawned off his stolen box onto you instead.”

 

Lee considered this, taking in her surroundings, reaching out for Dead Last’s siren call of chakra, which was unfortunately too faint for her to make out. More, it was… He was always hard to pick out, hard to keep solidified in her mind, and so even if she could teleport to him, even if she hadn’t been expressly forbidden from teleporting outside of the village before her chunin exams, she wasn’t entirely certain she would be able to find him with five far more memorable chakra signatures distracting her.

 

So instead, she shifted, the kunai in her hand gleaming under the scant moonlight, and took in a deep clear breath as they looked at her, laughing, their own blades very sharp and no doubt very lethal.

 

She could guess, without even having to be told, exactly what had happened to the Kumo ninja before they had found him bleeding to death in Wind.

 

“So, gentlemen, I see we are at an impasse,” Lee said, addressing each of them in a clear and cool tone.

 

“Impasse? No, little girl, little kunoichi, you’re at your end,”

 

Lee’s eyes darted to the box and then back up, but the one in front, a man with paler hair than the others, just laughed, “Oh, we’ll kill you for the box, don’t worry about that. But you’d die even if you didn’t have it,”

 

“That’s nice,” Lee said, rather blandly, taking in each of them, the weapons, the beads, and feeling herself shutting down, preparing to do what was necessary whatever that might be (funny, she’d never killed a person before, not a real person), “Unfortunately I have somewhere I need to be. Unless, of course, you’re the ones my useless teammate has managed to run into.”

 

None of them seemed particularly concerned about that, or gave any indication of having run into Dead Last on their way to this point,

 

“Oh, I like her,” one of the others said, grinning at the one in front, “She will make an excellent sacrifice for Jashin,”

 

(She should have figured she would run into Satanists.)

 

Sacrifice, Lee paused at that, tilted her head and felt herself blanch as she considered all that might entail, “Just to clarify, this isn’t virgin sacrifice, putting me on an altar, _Gregorian_ chanting, summoning some foul demon into my body sort of a sacrifice, is it?”

 

This, at least, was met with confused silence from her audience as Lee went on, “Because honestly, if I’m going to choose my ritualistic sacrificial death, then I’d much prefer the Temple of Doom version, where my heart is ripped out from my chest as I’m tied to two posts, eaten by Kali, and then I’m left to burn in lava. You know, if I get a choice… Because at least that version has some dignity.”

 

Two of them turned to each other, eyeing her, and then one of them whispered, “Do you think Jashin would like that?”

 

The other shrugged as if to say he wasn’t quite sure if Jashin would like it or not but odds are Jashin wouldn’t be offended by it.

 

“Don’t worry, little girl, your death shall be suitably horrific to suit Jashin’s bloodlust,”

 

“Oh, great, out of curiosity can I not be sacrificed to Jashin?” Lee asked, just throwing it out there, in case they hadn’t considered it.

 

But the answer was short, simple, and filled with dark amusement and bloodlust, “No,”

 

“Well, alright then,” Lee offered them all a grin before adding, “Unfortunately, like I said, today really isn’t a good day for me to die.”

 

And with that she threw the kunai forward into one of the man’s head, or tried to, but he ducked out of the way bringing up one of his own kunai to block it, at that point the others began to rush her and Lee hastily threw up a shield to hold them back, kicking the box behind her as she did so.

 

And at that point, it started to get blurry, because while they weren’t quite plant zombie good, they were fast, and there were five of them and one of her, and unlike Minato or Jiraiya in sparring they were aiming to kill rather than simply bruise.

 

She found herself ducking backwards, dodging and rolling, and just missing getting her throat slit or a scythe through her ribs. Keeping the box somehow out of their reach by either pulling it back, flinging it elsewhere, or just keeping it under her.

 

And then… Then she got the first one, jabbing her own kunai into his jugular, watching as he began to twitch and seize and then fall to the ground gurgling even as the blood sprayed onto her own face and clothing.

 

All the while thinking that this was her first, this was the first time she’d ever killed anything human and it was so…

 

But as she watched him fall, watched the light burn out of her eyes, one of the others used her distraction to ram a sword through her shoulder blades. She felt herself drop, her arm twitching, blood beginning to seep out as she let out a cry.

 

Another moved in, blade aimed at her neck, and time itself seemed to slow.

 

Lee was going to die, there was a blade reflected in her eyes and she’d lost one of her arms without time to heal it, she was going to die.

 

She’d see her father again, Death again, and they’d sit beneath the golden tree and surely that would be fine… But… It wasn’t as if it really mattered, as if death would ever really matter to her, Death itself.

 

But there must have been something more human in her than she remembered having, because without thought, on self-preservation instinct alone, everything rebelled against that silver crescent scythe inching ever closer to her neck.

 

And there was only that thought, that one single thought: No.

 

Lee opened the box, ducked down, and squeezed her eyes shut as she felt the wonders of the universe, the commandments of God, pour out as a pillar of blinding white light into the heavens, and around her the men stared up in wonder at all they were not meant to see in this life, and paid for it with everything they were.

 

When she opened her eyes again she saw that her hands were shaking, both covered in blood, the box was empty, and aside from the dark clothing surrounding her, the body of the one fallen man, and the littered weapons were five rosaries.

 

Lee stood slowly, closed the box, tucked it back under her uninjured arm even as the other shoulder stitched itself back together, and slowly accelerated into a sprint towards Dead Last’s meager call of chakra.

 

* * *

 

As she reached for it, pale hand outstretched, eyes not meeting his directly, he brought his own head crashing forward into hers, knocking her off balance and onto her back, which Haru used as an opportunity to quickly backpedal and try to sprint for the woods.

 

A kunai whizzed past him, causing him to stagger and almost fall over, and looking over his shoulder he could see that she had placed the blindfold back on and was somehow walking towards him, unconcerned by the terrain or her lack of ability to see.

 

“That was not fair, Haru,” Lee’s clone said, almost lightly, if it weren’t for the downward curl of her lips.

 

He ran a few steps further this time managing to make it into the tree line only for another kunai to whizz past, actually grazing his cheek this time.

 

“It’s not in my nature to fight like this, you know, I was hardly designed for it,”

 

The clone walked casually after him, so like Lee, Lee in training games where it was her job to hunt him down and end him (only this time it wasn’t just a game, it wasn’t training, this time it was real and there was no one here to help him).

 

He ran further, zig-zagging his way through the trees, breathing heavily as he did so and breaking twigs, and listening to her calm reassured footsteps as she followed each and every turn he took.

 

“I was supposed to help people, help Orochimaru deal with his emotional problems, killing people, killing emotionally distressed people, didn’t really factor into the equation,” She paused then, and as Haru looked back over his shoulder he could see her grinning, that Lee grin that was so at odds with every situation, “You know what the sad thing is, I don’t think he even wants this box. I just happened to be in the area, and he said, go fetch it for me, go see if it’s worth something. My first trial period, if you will.”

 

She brought her hands together, began quickly flashing through hand seals, and under her breath muttered something leaving Haru only a few seconds to scramble forward as the tree he was hiding behind exploded. 

 

“Of course, that’s his trouble, he doesn’t know what he wants.”

 

Haru stumbled forward, almost pitching forward, overbalanced with his hands tied behind him, but only just managing to bring himself up as he kept running.

 

“Oh, he thinks he knows. He thinks he knows everything, is the only one who has seen the truth of the world, and more, seen the solution to it. As if the world, as if reality itself, were a fundamental problem that needs fixing. But that’s what he chooses to believe in, the balm for his wretched existence, because without that… Well, what would he have left?”

 

She stopped walking, he couldn’t hear her footsteps, but then there was the sound of whizzing again except this time, the kunai hit, it lodged itself deep into the back of his knee, the pain sharp and sudden, almost bringing him down.

 

Will alone, will and the desperate drumbeat of his heart, kept him hobbling forward on one leg.

 

At least, until another kunai came again, into the back of his other leg, pitching him forward until he was landing flat on his face, scraping his cheek against the branches and the rocks on the forest floor.

 

Her soft, almost silent footsteps, sounded behind him, the footsteps of the Shinigami himself. She placed her foot in between his shoulder blades, pressed down, “Be glad you won’t see it, Haru, because his final solution will kill us all,”

 

“Please,” He cried out, twisting his face so that he could catch sight of hers again, “Please, I don’t want to die.”

 

She said nothing, just… Smiled at him again, that soft, almost sad smile, the one from the bridge.

 

“No, no, no, please!”

 

She turned her head then, and before Haru could blink she’d thrown herself backwards, off of Haru, and narrowly avoided a jagged bolt of lightning, passing through where her head had been.

 

And there was that same voice, Lee’s voice, and he turned and saw a thoroughly put out, far more familiar, Eru Lee walking towards him and her clone, a golden box carried under one arm, “If this one’s a cultist, I swear to God, I’m going to have to cut someone. There should be some sort of rule that people can’t try to sacrifice you more than once in a day.”

 

He grinned up at her, or tried too, half of his face still in the dirt, and she looked down at him with those quizzically raised eyebrows.

 

“Jesus, Dead Last, are you crying?”

 

He probably was, he was shaking at least, but all he could say was, “You have no idea how happy I am to see you,”

 

* * *

 

“There, that should do it…” Jiraiya stood back up, stretching, popping his back, and then finally turned from the box to his students.

 

Student.

 

Minato stood there, leaking an impressive amount of killing intent for someone his age, pale blue eyes burning and practically cutting into Jiraiya without mercy, the scroll still tied to his waist, twirling a kunai carefully in one hand, and that was it.

 

No Lee and no…

 

“Kai!”

 

No Haru.

 

“Oh, good, you’ve finally finished,” Minato said with a rather thin smile, “Now, if you don’t mind, Lee went off to fetch Haru about half an hour ago, so we should really start looking for them.”

 

“What the hell did you do?” Jiraiya cried out, “I told you guys to just sit there and not touch anything!”  


“Well, Lee and I were all too happy to do that, until we noticed the genjutsu and then noticed that Haru was gone. And then, since you’d told us how delicate this was, how interrupting you might cause a disaster beyond our imaginations and kill us all, well Lee felt she had no choice to go out and look for him herself. And she hasn’t come back yet, sensei.”

 

Well, Minato was certainly pissed, and as soon as he had a bit more chakra to back that up he’d be goddamn terrifying (as it was Jiraiya was more than a little unnerved, although that could be the panic of two thirds of his students missing).

 

Jiraiya didn’t need to be told twice though, now that the thing was sealed and damn near unfindable by whoever had been tailing them Jiraiya didn’t mind leaving it sitting there while he went to collect his students… His hopefully living students.

 

Lee, Lee would survive, at least, she had before but Haru…

 

“Come on,” Jiraiya started moving, picking Minato up and throwing him over his shoulders, moving at speeds Minato just wasn’t capable of.

 

And it probably said a lot that Minato didn’t even seem to mind.

 

They sprinted forward, Jiraiya using his all but non-existent sensing abilities (without going into sage mode) to pinpoint Lee’s ridiculously large amount of chakra. That is, until he found himself stopping, staring at the body of a dead shirtless man and way too much extra clothing and blood for one guy.

 

“Holy shit,” Jiraiya said slowly, taking them all in, then shook himself and kept going.

 

Clearly, Lee had had fun, or Haru had become significantly more powerful than he’d ever been before. Either way it was a sign, good or bad Jiraiya didn’t really know, but a sign none the less.

 

 

Lee caught herself staring at the newest cultist, and then staring again, because while she’d seen others with red hair she hadn’t seen that many… Or that many who shared her skin tone, her height and…

 

“Is that?”

 

The redheaded, shoeless, blindfolded, almost certainly Lee-clone, dashed forward and knocked Lee off balance, grabbing at the empty golden box Lee had been carrying and then sprinting out past Lee and Dead Last without another word. Leaving Lee standing there, soaked in blood, staring after her, and Dead Last crippled on the forest floor.

 

With Lee having next to no idea what the hell was even going on. Except that Dead Last had been nearly killed, crippled at the very least, by one of Lee’s clones.

 

“Well, I feel like I should feel responsible for this but…” Lee trailed off, considering the trees where… her other self, had disappeared.

 

Dead Last just heaved out a shuddering sigh, began shaking in the dirt like he’d been holding it in the whole time, and slowly, twisting his head towards her, he asked, “…That… That wasn’t the real box, was it?”

 

“Oh, uh, no… I actually already used that one earlier.”

 

“Used?” Dead Last asked, looking like he was regretting even having to ask.

 

“I ran into some cultists who wanted to sacrifice me to some guy named Jashin… They decided to look into the light.”

 

“…And that’s bad?”

 

“Well, it was good for me,” Lee said, which really, at the end of things that was all that really mattered. Wasn’t it?

 

For a moment, they both waited in silence, waiting for something else to happen, or in Lee’s case at least waiting for the missing Kumo hunter ninja to finally show up. Maybe they’d just gone after the guy’s corpse back in Suna, or maybe they’d met their unfortunate demise and been ferried off to Jashin, whoever that was supposed to be.

 

Either way the woods seemed curiously empty and quiet.

 

Lee sighed, stretching, feeling the bruises and scrapes, and then looked down at Dead Last, who really was looking rather pathetic, “So, I’m guessing you can’t walk,”

 

“You think?”

 

Lee didn’t even bother to respond to that, just summoned from her vast reserves of chakra, and lifted Haru into a piggyback, probably looking ridiculous given that he was taller and broader than she was.

 

Lee then turned back to where she had come from with a sigh, at least grateful that, for whatever reason, the plant zombies hadn’t made an appearance. Even if the unexplained cultists had. But for whatever reasons Satanists were much less alarming than zombie plants, or at least, Lee wasn’t nearly as shaken by the experience.

 

Maybe she was just becoming desensitized to violence.

 

Although it had factored in with the whole Indiana Jones vibe the mission had strangely taken.

 

“…Thanks, Lee, for coming I mean,”

 

Lee glanced back over her shoulder to meet his eyes, some undecipherable expression inside of them, and then stared forward once again towards the path through the trees, “I wasn’t not going to come,”

 

“I know, but… Thank you,”

 

She had a feeling it was more than that, that this was important for him to say somehow, as important as it was for her to hear. So, she just nodded and kept walking, eventually running into an extremely panicked Jiraiya and extremely worried and angry Minato about halfway to where she’d left the cultists.

 

“What the hell is wrong with you two?!” “Well, Dead Last got kidnapped, and there were cultists, and then there weren’t cultists anymore but there was a clone, and now she’s gone too, and well… Dead Last is still alive, so go team.”

 

* * *

 

“Is that it?”

 

After setting the box back into the ominously glowing seals, having Lee produce a genjutsu to hide their location from any far-off flickers of chakra that could be interested in the contents, and then with reverent horror opening the original mysterious golden box, they all found themselves staring at the inside and…

 

The giant peach that rested inside of it.

 

For a moment, none of them said anything, all just staring at the fruit, which really did look like a giant peach (maybe a bit redder, a bit rounder, but overall just an oversized fruit) _._ Honestly, the glowing liquid that it was resting in was more intimidating than the actual fruit.

Lee, for one, felt this was bullshit, and that she’d somehow been ripped off.

 

“It’s… It’s a peach.” Dead Last said, clearly in the same mindset as Lee about all of this, which really when did they manage to get onto the same wavelength.

 

“Too big to be a peach.” Jiraiya commented, the only one of them actually looking like he was taking this seriously, well, besides the oddly somber Minato.

 

“I almost died because of a peach,” Dead Last actually looked decently offended by this, as he should be, because Lee was offended she had to go through all that bullshit for a peach.

 

“Well…” Jiraiya started only to be cut off by Dead Last.

 

“No, just, no,” Dead Last said, “I am sick of this bullshit! I was kidnapped by a rogue Lee clone, had my legs cut open, was almost brain washed, almost died, because of a peach!”

 

“Hey, squirt, I’m upset too…”

 

“Upset, upset doesn’t begin to cover this sensei!”

 

“Hey, I was almost a virgin sacrifice by a cult of shirtless _Satanists_ ,” Lee pointed out, to which Jiraiya dutifully corrected, “Jashinists, Lee,”

 

“Jashin, _Satan_ , they’re probably the same thing,” Lee said with a wave of her hand, really not caring to get into the semantics after Jiraiya’s miniature lecture on bizarre and violent shinobi religions after they’d all met back up.

 

“Well, what are we going to do with it?” Minato asked, looking down at it, “Are we going to bring it back into the village?”

 

“…I’m not sure, I haven’t decided that yet,” Jiraiya said, looking down at it in concentration, as if by staring alone he could unveil its juicy peachy secrets. Lee stared at it too, but the giant peach remained a mystery.

 

Finally, the silence seemed to stretch too long, and before anyone could stop him or say anything about it Dead Last grabbed the peach from the container, taking it out of the pale blue glowing water it had been resting in, and announced, “You know what, screw this peach, and screw this mission!”

 

And then, before anyone could stop him, Dead Last took a bite out of the peach, and then promptly fell backwards in some sort of an epileptic fit.

 

It appeared, Lee thought to herself as Dead Last started to arch backwards even as he twitched, an animalistic scream tearing itself from his throat, that the C-ranked mission was somehow not over yet.

 

* * *

 

Haru woke to a feeling of fuzziness and what sounded like Lee’s voice, but from a distant, steadily growing louder as he tried blinking into awareness, “Well, I think we’ve all learned something today, we’ve learned that it’s a bad idea to eat oversized peaches.”

 

“Really, Lee-chan, is that what you learned?”

 

“And that getting kidnapped is bad.”

 

“…The first was better,”

 

Haru slowly but surely sat up, helped by Minato, and found himself staring at the rather concerned expressions of his teammates. Well, sort of, they were all sort of drifting in and out of focus, his vision not quite settling.

 

“That… That was not a good idea, was it?” Haru asked, and judging by the look on their faces, by the look on even Lee’s face, it really wasn’t. “You probably wouldn’t be here still if Lee hadn’t been on hand… So, yeah, not a great idea,”

 

Haru winced, brought a hand to his face, and rubbed at his eyes.

 

Jiraiya continued though, “The good news is though, I have decided that the Kumo ninja absolutely knew what he was talking about, and that there is no way in hell we are bringing that thing back into Konoha with us.”

 

“But…” Minato started, eyes darting to Haru and then back to Jiraiya, but Jiraiya cut him off.

 

“Minato, Konoha couldn’t handle that much free power. It would be too… tempting.”

 

Power? Haru tried to look at him in confusion, vision swimming again, feeling more than a little nauseous, but before he could say anything Lee created a pair of sunglasses out of nothing and handed them over to him.

 

“You’re going to need those, Dead Last,”

 

“What?”

 

The three of them looked at each other, then looked back at him, finally Lee said, “Well, it turns out, that fruit just gave you magical swirly eyes… And a new hair color. But in case you feel weird about that, you still have no talent, and you probably still can’t walk up a tree.”

 

“What?” He just repeated dumbly, still holding the sunglasses, trying to look at his reflection but it was too dark and he just couldn’t seem to see right…

 

“We’ll talk about it later… With the hokage, and probably Oro… and the nidaime…” Jiraiya said, and then took the sunglasses from Haru’s hand and pushed them onto his nose and against his eyes, “In the meantime, let’s start heading back.”

 

(And on the way, before reaching the gates of Konoha, Lee banished the box and its copies out of existence, although where exactly that was, and what exactly that meant, no one could really explain.

 

Except that, when they met the guard at the gate and he stared at Haru, then Lee, all Jiraiya said in explanation was, “C-rank,”)


	17. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

_In which despite having great gifts bestowed upon him Dead Last is still dead last, Minato and Lee begin to contemplate their respective futures past the chunin exams, and the pair attempt to get to the bottom of the philosophy of the clones._

 

* * *

Jiraiya wondered if he had ever been this exhausted in his life.

 

Well, the war, Ame…

 

But Ame, that was a different kind of exhaustion, that tore not only at the muscles but also the soul. That fight with Hanzo, that desperate fight that they had failed to win, he still ached from it, he imagined Tsunade and Orochimaru did as well.

 

God, he knew they did.

But this, this was different, but somehow was approaching becoming just as taxing in its own way.

 

It wasn’t in his muscles, and not in the bleak weariness that came of rain and blood and children screaming in the streets, but all the same the stress…

 

He couldn’t take much more of these goddamn C-ranked missions.

 

Perhaps it was the nidaime, sitting in the hokage’s office to the left of sensei’s desk, with a surprisingly blank look on his face, who best summarized what Jiraiya felt about his latest and perhaps greatest C-rank mission, “What is wrong with you?”

 

And Jiraiya felt that it said a lot that this was after all the details, and then clarifying details, and then reassurances that Jiraiya and the kids were perfectly serious, that the nidaime was blurting this out.

 

Sensei, for his own part had removed his hat to better place a hand across his face, while Senju Hashirama looked like he was trying to decide whether he was incredibly dubious, curious, horrified, excited, or some morbid mixture of all of them as he stared unnervingly at Haru.

 

And the kids, well, perhaps understandably they weren’t exactly their best.

 

Not only were they unusually blood stained, Haru and Lee’s clothing both having seen far better days, but they were also understandably ruffled by the latest events and each looked more than a little out of it.

 

Minato was standing unusually close to Lee, even for Minato, holding one of her hands in his with a deceptive casualness, glancing at her occasionally, before forcing his eyes back to the hokage as well as the past hokages.

 

Haru though, he was standing close to her too, slumped against her shoulder with his eyes closed, gripping the glasses Lee had given to him loosely in one hand. And somehow, even though his face hadn’t changed, nor his general skin tone, he looked like an entirely different kid with that thick white hair.

 

(Strange, it was somehow lighter and cleaner looking that Jiraiya’s own hair, a different shade of white altogether when Jiraiya had always been convinced that there weren’t any other shades of white out there.)

 

Of them all, it was Lee, standing staring straight ahead with a rather exhausted look on her face, who somehow looked the most put together out of all of them.

 

Which Jiraiya felt said entirely too much about everything.

 

The nidaime was pouring over the contents of the original mission documentation with a sort of determined confusion that just looked wrong on his face, “A simple escort mission to Suna, something any rookie genin team should be qualified for. And you tell me that it devolves into missing Kumo nins, Jashinists, rogue clones, and ancient relics that awaken lost blood limits?”

 

Tobirama glared straight at Jiraiya then, “This would never happen to any other team!”

 

“Hey, it’s not my fault we were in the right place at the right time!” Jiraiya said defensively to which the nidaime didn’t even bother to respond, just muttered under his breath and began pacing back and forth, a habit he’d never indulged in when he himself had been hokage.

 

Or, at least, never in the few meetings Jiraiya had had with him when he was still a genin and the man still alive.

 

“Why is it, Jiraiya, that every week your team seems to cause me a month’s work of highly classified paperwork?” Sensei asked before sighing and looking Jiraiya in the eye, not even giving Jiraiya a chance to protest that this really wasn’t his fault, “So, what do we know about this? It appears this originated in Lightning’s borders, until the Kumo nin fled to Suna, the Jashinists, the ninja, and the clone all seem to have originated from there and just happened to end up in Wind near you.”

 

Jiraiya nudged Haru, the boy blinked, black eyes (darker than they’d been before the mission) flickering in and out of the rinnegan, almost as if they were bleeding that deep violet color, as they had been since he’d first come back into consciousness.

 

And unlike Nagato, he didn’t have an Uzumaki’s chakra supply to sacrifice to a dojutsu like that.

 

(Which was probably half the reason he’d looked half dead since they’d passed through the front gates.)

 

“That’s… That’s what she said, that she’d been tracking them from Lightning, or that she’d stumbled across them in Lightning.” Haru said uncertainly before adding, “She didn’t spend too much time talking about where she came from.”

 

“She came from here, we know that, but somehow she wound up in Lightning or at the very least at the borders of the Land of Fire,” the nidaime’s eyes then landed on Lee, practically daring her to contradict him, to which Lee stared back with a rather nonplussed and entirely unamused expression.

 

“Don’t look at me, there isn’t a clone in Konoha who has any business being outside of it.” Lee said before elaborating rather tersely, “Every clone I’ve made has some reason to be here, inside of the village, and once their task is done they’ll do everything in their power to kill themselves. Even if one managed to get out of the village they’d either try to get back inside or just try to kill themselves out of despair.”

 

Lee’s hands flew up in defense and her eyes hardened as she said, “They’re not like us, and they have no desire to be. They don’t dream of electric sheep, nidaime-sama,”

 

“And yet, one is missing, outside, with two stolen sharingans which according to our records should not possibly exist, attacking Konoha ninja, reputedly working for some unknown benefactor, and existing entirely beyond the control of the village,” The nidaime concluded, and then, in a particularly chilling voice asked, “Tell me, Eru Lee, can you personally account for every clone you’ve made?”

 

Here, rightly, Lee’s eyes became a little wide and Jiraiya could almost read the panic inside of them. Jiraiya imagined, were it any other situation, the nidaime would smirk at her. However, his face gave away nothing this time, only the reflection of that cold fire that burned inside of his soul, a ruthless merciless thing that had earned him his title of nidaime hokage.

 

He hadn’t seen the clone himself, but he imagined that Lee was thinking on her right now, and trying to piece together how this had possibly happened (when the depressed realist inside of Jiraiya said they should have been expecting something like this months ago).

 

“I thought I could,” Lee said softly, bowing slightly under the combined weight of everyone’s gaze, “I’ll look into it, hokage-sama, before we leave for the chunin exams.”

 

Then, shortly and almost stiffly, she added, “This won’t happen again.”

 

Then looking up at sensei in askance she caught the grim turn of his lips as he said, “I trust you understand that the details of your mission, the pertinent ones at least, are quite classified. You tell no one of the Jashinists, the relic, or the origin of your teammate’s new blood limits. Later, Jiraiya will tell you what you can say about what happened, but nothing until then. Do you understand?”

 

“Of course, hokage-sama,” Lee said solemnly, staring Sarutobi-sensei straight in the eye as she did so, and somehow looking older than she truly was, so that Jiraiya could easily imagine the adult version of the girl standing in the twelve-year-old’s place.

 

“Good, then Namikaze, Eru you’re dismissed. Start looking into this clone business of yours and see that it hasn’t gotten as out of hand as it appears to have.”

 

Lee replied shortly, “Yes, hokage-sama,”

 

Minato blinked, but none the less offered a stiff bow in tandem with Lee, then without a word, and only a short glance back at the rest of them, they both walked swiftly out the door letting it shut softly behind them.

 

And then it was only the adults and poor Haru. Somehow, Jiraiya was certain that the wave of exhaustion he suddenly felt was felt just as keenly by everyone else in the room. Because really, how the hell were they supposed to address the giant elephant in the room?

 

Jiraiya had had half a day to think on it already, and each time the conversation ran in his head it hit a solid brick wall, because while he’d had this same conversation before with Uzumaki Nagato it’d been different then.

 

Nagato, after all, had been born with the rinnegan, more he was an Uzumaki, and records suggested that at one point it had been an Uzumaki blood limit that had simply died out over the centuries.

 

Haru was civilian through and through, the son of a merchant who in turn had been the son of a merchant, not a single drop of shinobi blood going back for generations. Yet here he was, with a blood limit that had been dead for centuries, only returned in Nagato.

 

How were they supposed to explain this?

 

Even the truth (a truth that he had truly debated not revealing to his own sensei), that he had eaten some giant magical fruit that had been in some golden box, had been something out of a children’s tale rather than anything believable. More believable would have been Lee just granting him the power somehow, but even that hadn’t happened.

 

And that fruit… He’d gotten rid of it, or had Lee get rid of it for him, but either way while sensei was sure to agree with him (did already) if word of this ever got to Danzo or the council Jiraiya would not be getting off easy, if at all.

 

(But when Haru had come to, when he’d seen those eyes, he’d had the vision of dozens of unwanted children each handed a slice of that fruit, a bastardized remnant of the ancient Uzumaki clan forced into existence for a dojutsu that perhaps should remain buried.)

 

He rubbed at his own face, sighing, and deciding it’d be best if he said something first since no one else seemed to be in the mood to break the thick silence surrounding them, “So, Haru, I’m guessing you haven’t had a chance to look in a mirror yet.”

 

“No, Jiraiya-sensei,” Haru said somewhat weakly, his eyes fluttering shut again, which, well, Jiraiya didn’t know if that was good or bad. It could be that Haru at least instinctively knew that the eyes were draining his chakra when they kept flickering like that or he could be two seconds from passing out. Jiraiya wasn’t sure he liked either option.

 

“Well, when you do… It appears that your adventure with our mystery peach has granted you an ancient Uzumaki bloodlimit called the rinnegan,” Jiraiya said before sparing an exhausted look to the current hokage as well as the former ones, “Any of you guys want to explain?”

 

After a moment of awkward silence, it was the shodaime who started in, “Not much is known about the rinnegan, frankly, like the mokuton it has roots centuries ago but has faded in the modern era as bloodlines became diluted. Honestly, most shinobi would probably fail to recognize it if they saw it. However, old records claimed that it was… like the sharingan, perhaps even a precursor to the modern sharingan. Madara always claimed it was an Uchiha bloodlimit, rather than an Uzumaki one, just like the Hyuga might be a clan that branched off from the Uchiha.”

 

“He would have,” Tobirama scoffed only to receive a chiding look from his elder brother.

 

Haru blinked, eyes darting to Jiraiya, purple then dark then purple again, “What does… What does this mean?”

 

“It means you now possess a great gift, and far more potential than you ever had before as a shinobi,” Sarutobi-sensei summarized rather bluntly, “However, you will now draw more attention than you ever have before as well, and everyone and their brother will be after those eyes of yours.”

 

“After…”  


“Just this year Kumo attempted to kidnap Uzumaki Kushina,” the nidaime remarked casually, “And Kushina does not possess the rinnegan or any other blood limit,”

 

Haru swallowed, paled considerably, his face almost matching his hair, “But I… I’m not like Lee, I’m not…”

 

“That’s the thing, Haru. You don’t have a choice now, you’re going to have to be,” Jiraiya said, and why did always hurt when he had to be pragmatic like this, “But I’m going to teach you how to use it, even if it kills us both, and trust me when I say, when you master the rinnegan you won’t even have to worry about whether you can climb trees or not…”

 

Well, not precisely true, because you couldn’t solely rely on a blood limit, even the Uchiha and Hyuga were aware of that (no, the best shinobi had to match the potential of their dojutsu, rather than rely on their eyes alone to be their strength, that was an all too fast recipe for winding up dead).

 

But that seemed like the last thing Haru needed to hear right now.

 

“More, from now on, your family is distantly related to a civilian Uzumaki who can trace their roots back to the original clan,” Sarutobi-sensei added, picking up a pen and tapping on his latest pile of paperwork with a rather grim frown, “The last thing we want people wondering is how a blood limit comes from nothing.”

 

“But I… What if I…” Haru trailed off and just gave them all this pathetic almost haunted look as he said, “I’m not sure I can do this, sensei,”

 

“You can, you will, we have a little bit of time. We’ll get it under control, you’ll become well acquainted with sunglasses for a little while, and then who knows… One day you may even match Lee with those eyes of yours.”

 

Although, perhaps it was the look on Haru’s face as well as the mental image of Lee’s overpowering confidence, but Jiraiya wondered if, even with the rinnegan, Haru would ever be quite on Eru Lee’s level.

 

* * *

 

Outside it was almost sunrise, the midnight debriefing with the hokage having lasted far longer than Minato would have liked, and as the sky began to lighten and rays of pale yellow light caught themselves in Lee’s hair, Minato found himself asking, “Well, Lee, where do we start?”

 

“Napping?” Lee asked, “I don’t know about you, but I could use a solid ten or twelve hours of sleep.”

 

He was tired, he’d been tired for a while really, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d gotten a decent night’s sleep. Probably back before that second C-ranked mission, where Lee had died when no one was looking…

 

“Besides, the last time I did anything important when this tired it turned into me poisoning myself and winding up the hospital… I’d rather not repeat that,” Lee said with a shrug, before adding, “And we’d probably have to talk to Orochimaru anyway, which I’d rather not do before sunrise even if he is awake.”

 

“Right, I wouldn’t either,” Minato returned and walked beside Lee as they headed back to their apartment.

 

It was quiet out, the market not yet open, only a scattered number of civilians here and there setting up shop as well as a few errant shinobi either leaving or returning from various missions. It made Konoha seem bigger than usual, almost, these empty streets reminding him of just how much space there was in his home village.

 

All the same, rather than think of the early morning Konoha he so rarely saw (as he was either usually training at this point or sleeping), he turned his attention to Lee instead.

 

She looked better than she had the last time, after their last disastrous C-ranked mission, or at least, more aware of herself. True there was a frown on her face, a rather terse expression, but she didn’t seem quite as lost as last time. Whatever moment of internal questioning she’d had seemed to have passed, or settled, and Minato was infinitely grateful for it.

 

Still, “Where do you think the clone came from?”

 

“Dead Last said it was an Emotional Support Lee,” Lee said, “One that threw herself into the river…”

 

“You don’t believe him?”

 

“Murder isn’t emotionally supportive, Minato,” Lee said slowly, “I wouldn’t think an Emotional Support Lee would have that in them… Shouldn’t have that in them.”

 

It didn’t come out harsh or accusing, but all the same he asked, almost thoughtfully, “And how do you know what they have in them or don’t?”

 

She blinked at him, large green eyes flickering open and shut like shutters, and she offered him a small and thoughtful frown, “It’s… I know what I make, Minato. I’m not… careless,”

 

“I know but… They aren’t like clones I make, are they? They’re complicated, and independent, almost like they are people even when they’re not. Lee, you’re creating people, not just clones, there could be something you’re overlooking.”

 

She shoved her hands into her pockets, kicked at the dirt of the road as she walked, and then said, almost unwillingly, “... We’ll try that first then.”

 

“What first?”

 

“The Voigt-Kampff test, a Turing test, see just how human they are or aren’t. If we’re unravelling what they really are we should start at the beginning, with what they are, rather than the one who happens to be missing.”

 

Despite how serious she looked, how tired, her clothes torn and now stiff with dried blood all down the back, he couldn’t help the smile tugging at his lips at the terms that were both hopelessly foreign yet familiar for all that Lee used them.

 

Because this was where they had started, where they had always been, Lee and Minato together on adventures hunting down the cogs of reality itself. Some of his earliest memories were of him and Lee running down the streets of Konoha, him and the foreign girl with the strange accent and brilliant light in her geen eyes, desperately attempting to avoid whatever disaster happened to be following in their wake.

 

“Are you going to ask them about tortoises in the desert, or even their mothers?” Minato asked with a sly smile.

 

“And spiders too of course,” Lee responded as if this was a perfectly natural answer to give, and not one that he had only come to understand so well after living with her so long and beginning his translation of her devotedly written _“Blade Runner_ ”.

 

And now he found himself musing on all the memories associated with this and couldn’t help but think of that bell test with Jiraiya-sensei all those months ago, almost a full year now.

 

“We really are coming full circle today, aren’t we, Lee?”

 

“Full circle?” Lee asked rather dubiously, which didn’t manage to dampen his light and airy mood at all.

 

“Oh, it’s nothing important,” Minato said with that cheerful and rather infectious smile on his lips, “I know I can’t explain it, and I probably shouldn’t be thinking this way with everything that’s happened, but I’m looking forward to this,”

 

“It really is just like old times, isn’t it, my friend?” she offered him an uncertain smile back, and then a full grin as she took his hand into hers, “You know, I think I am too, Minato,”

 

It was only when they reached the apartment that she spared him a dull look and insisted, “But seriously, sleep first, then artificial intelligence.”

 

* * *

 

Maybe this was unfair to Jiraiya, but Haru felt he hadn’t been given nearly enough processing time before he summoned them all to train again. A day of rest wasn’t nearly good enough, wasn’t nearly enough time to stop doing double takes at his own reflection or try to explain to his parents why he looked like a stranger after what should have been a fairly basic mission.

 

(He didn’t know if it was relieving or sad that his parents had taken his explanation of ‘chakra’ and ‘ninja techniques’ at face value when it came to explaining why his hair was white and why he had to wear sunglasses indoors.

 

Although he still wasn’t sure how to break great great grandmother Uzumaki Miho, complete with her name added to an old Uzumaki registry Uzumaki Mito owned, to them… He’d sort of put that one off.)

 

All the same, the great chunin exams were still looming overhead, now only a few weeks away rather than months, and somehow Haru felt even less prepared than he had a few days ago. Which, considering that a few days before he’d felt like he was probably going to die a very early death in the exams, said quite a bit.

 

They were seated cross legged in a semi-circle around Jiraiya-sensei, Lee and Minato having brought insant ramen for breakfast while Haru wished he’d been smart enough to bring breakfast with him, and maybe it was just Haru (and his now truly terrible eyesight), but none of them looked particularly energetic this morning.

 

Well, they all looked vaguely fuzzy, and then sometimes startlingly in focus and absurdly colorful, it felt like his eyes kept changing shape and couldn’t decide what to settle on (which, according to Jiraiya-sensei and the hokage, was exactly what was happening right now).

 

“Alright kids, now I know I mentioned this on the mission before it well… fell off the rails, but the chunin exams are literally just around the corner. We have a few weeks before we’re headed back to Suna and… Yes, Haru-kun?”

 

Haru raised his hand, almost sheepishly, wondering how much of an idiot he looked like in these sunglasses (which he apparently was never to take off until he’d learned how to stop partially using the rinnegan), “Uh, sensei, considering everything that’s… happened, can we maybe, I don’t know, not enter the chunin exams this year?”

 

Jiraiya sighed, raked a hand through his hair, and gave Haru a truly sympathetic look, “Afraid not, Haru-kun. See, the chunin exams are rather… political, at the end of things. It’s not just about promoting genin to chunin, I mean it is, but it’s also about making a statement. This close to the end of a war, the hokage is going to gun for his best and brightest being represented in the exams. And, please don’t let this get to any of your heads, but you all easily rank among the best and brightest of your graduating class.”

 

“I don’t!” Haru cried, flinging a hand towards his chest with enough flailing that his glasses momentarily fell off and he quickly put them back on and readjusted them.

 

Jiraiya-sense ignored him, something that was all too familiar for Haru, “It doesn’t hurt that you guys are also all more than ready for the chunin exams, both in skills, and on paper with all of the goddamn ridiculous missions we’ve pulled recently. Really, most of you are almost guaranteed to pass, which is practically unheard of.”

 

Oh, Jiraiya just never came out and said it, did he? It always had to be Haru or god forbid Lee that was blunt about it, because Jiraiya just never wanted to hurt Haru’s feelings, “By most of us you mean Minato and Lee!”

 

“Who did you think he meant?” Lee asked with raised eyebrows and a rather dubious look on her face.

 

“That’s not the point, brats!” Jiraiya said with an aggravated sigh, before saying, “And if you must know, I’m more confident in Minato-kun here than the two of you.”

 

Haru, Minato, and Lee all gaped and said to him at the same time, “What?”

 

“Remember, Lee, when we talked about not using all of our blood limits and broadcasting our abilities to technically allied villages?” Jiraiya asked.

 

Lee blinked, paled, stopped eating as she stared with narrow eyes at Jiraiya, “… You were serious about that?”

 

“Perfectly,” Jiraiya said, “Which is why for the next few weeks we’ll be taking minimal D-ranks and instead focusing on training. In Minato-kun’s case we’re going to be building up some of his more advanced and flashy skills, in Lee-chan’s case, we’re going to be dumbing down your ridiculously advanced and flashy skills, and in Haru-kun’s case we’re going to be solidifying those basics and getting your eyes under control.”

 

“Wait, but how do… Normal people are so… limited!” Lee said, looking down at her hands as if she’d never seen them before and had absolutely no idea what to do with them.

 

“It’s easy, just pretend you’re not secretly an S-ranked genin and that’ll solve half of your problems,” Jiraiya said before stating, “Now, you all have something you really need to be working on and I’ll be splitting time with each of you. Haru, work on that tree, try to make some progress before I come over and talk dojutsus with you. Lee, come up with ways to replicate basic techniques like a normal person, or at least find a way to fake it convincingly… Start with hand seals. Minato, you and I are going to talk fuinjutsu for a little bit.”

 

Lee stood slowly, still staring at her hands in concentration, while Jiraiya stood and took Minato off to the side and rolled out an empty scroll between them. Looking forlornly at the tree, then back at the rest of them, Haru decided to move himself next to Lee.

 

He picked up her ramen while she was suitably distracted, eyed it critically, and decided that since he was pretty much screwed anyway it wouldn’t hurt to have some breakfast. Lee didn’t even seem to notice.

 

Slowly, uncertainly, Lee began to bring her hands together in what Haru was guessing was a poor attempt at remembering the twelve hand seals, mouthing the names of various animals under her breath even as she frowned down at her hands.

 

“It’s the zodiac, you know,” Haru commented, “The hand seals are based on the zodiac,”

 

“The zodiac?” Lee asked, “You mean there are twelve of these things you have to have memorized?”

 

“That part’s not so bad,” Haru said with a shrug as he finished her ramen, “Honestly, it’s getting it to work that’s half the trouble.”

 

“Aren’t you supposed to be walking up a tree?” Lee asked critically, finally turning to him, and adding with distaste, “And not eating my breakfast for me?”

 

“Can I admit that I’m kind of tired of that tree?” Haru asked, rubbing the back of his head before sighing, “Plus, I’m kind of tired in general, apparently the rinnegan, if you keep it on all the time, really drains your chakra.”

 

It was like a lightbulb went off over her head as she peered at him, “Oh, the swirly eyes… How is that anyways?”

 

“Well, people are either blurry or disturbingly in focus so… It could be better.”

 

“Right, well, you probably shouldn’t have eaten that giant mystery peach,” Lee said succinctly, clearly stating the obvious (although, Haru wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t eaten it, would they still be sitting out there deciding what to do, or else would Lee have broken first and ate it for him).

 

“Oh, shut up, don’t you have rogue emotionally traumatizing clones to track down or something?” Haru returned, repressing his own haunting flashbacks to the clone of Lee, the glow of her red eyes, and her polite sympathy as she hunted him down.

 

“Hey, Minato and I are diligently working on that, Dead Last,” Lee replied, “You know, after we do all this chunin training stuff...”  


Lee trailed off, her hands fit together, then she asked uncertainly, “Is this rat?”

 

“Uh, no, I don’t think that’s a hand seal at all, actually,” considering it looked like a weird cross between dog and dragon rather than anything Haru had ever used, “Also, remember that I have an actual name, that isn’t Dead Last.”

 

“Yeah, right, whatever,” Lee said before throwing her hands in the air, “Being a normal person is absurd!”

 

“It’s not that bad…”  


“You can’t even walk up a tree!” Lee accused, which was true, but she didn’t need to go saying it like that, “Actually, as the most normal if mediocre person I know, what is in your range of capabilities?”

 

“Uh… the academy three really,” Haru said because, well, Minato had certainly moved beyond that, and Lee had never been limited to the academy three even while in the academy, but Haru… Well, he’d sort of plateaued since graduation.

 

At Lee’s perfectly blank look he explained, “You know, basic clones, henges, some taijutsu…”

 

“That’s it?” Lee asked, “How are you even alive right now?”

 

Luck, absurd luck, and then Lee herself this last time. Although… How much longer could his luck possibly last him? Lee sighed, appeared to give up, and sat down next to him, “Jiraiya did say genjutsu was still a go, didn’t he?”

 

“To be honest, Lee, I really don’t remember,” After all, most of his memories of the mission were now haunted by Lee’s blind clone and his brush with near death in the forest.

 

Lee closed her eyes, sighed, and in the posture of a great sage contemplating the meaning of existence said, “I believe he said no teleportation, no grabbing jutsu, no clones… But I think genjutsu, or anything in Minato’s range of capabilities, should be fine.”

 

Lee then opened her eyes, leaned in far too close to Haru, and said, “Minato counts as a genin, right?”

 

“…Yes, Minato counts,” Haru grudgingly admitted, although really, he and Minato were on complete opposite ends of the genin spectrum, if there were any gods then Minato would undoubtedly be getting a promotion to chunin while Haru wouldn’t.

 

“Oh, well, that’s… less terrible,” Lee said with a small smile, “Minato’s really not too bad,”

 

“No, he’s really not,” Haru concurred, by which he meant that Minato was ridiculously talented and always had been. Enough so to make clan heirs look like idiots, when they all had started long before Minato and Lee, and had extra help at home.

 

For a moment, he and Lee observed Minato, having momentarily abandoned the scroll and was flying through hand seals, a great gale flying from them with a final shout much to Jiraiya’s clear pride.

 

“These exams aren’t going to be fun at all, are they, Dead Last?” Lee said, and for once, Haru found himself in perfect agreement with her.

 

“Nope, they’re going to suck.”

 

* * *

 

“Damn, Minato-kun, I’ve got to say, I’m kind of impressed,” Jiraiya said, “We really haven’t talked too much on the specifics of fuinjutsu but you’ve made good progress on your own with those explosive tags. And your futon jutsus aren’t bad either.”

 

Minato grinned, smile ranging from ear to ear as he dropped his hands from the seal position, it was really nice to hear, especially since he hadn’t had as much time to practice as he would have liked what with the nidaime’s English demands and Lee’s hospitilization, “Thank you, Jiraiya-sensei.”

 

“I almost feel bad for whatever poor bastard they pit against you,” Jiraiya said, a smile on his own face now as he envisioned Minato’s future exam.

 

“Unless it’s Lee, you mean,” Minato corrected diligently.

 

“Right, unless it’s Lee… In which case, well, you’ve fought her more than enough to know what sort of strategies you should be using there,” Jiraiya said, “But seriously, kid, I think you have some great things ahead of you.”

 

Jiraiya paused then, looked at him critically, and asked, “Hey, Minato-kun, you ever thought about what you plan to do after you make chunin?”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“Well, what sort of shinobi do you want to be? What do you want to specialize in? Or even more short term stuff than that,” Jiraiya said motioning to their surroundings as if they contained all of Minato’s future possibilities.

 

To be honest, other than that far-off dream of being hokage, Minato hadn’t thought of what he wanted to do if he passed his exams. Probably stay a field shinobi, maybe specialize in fuinjutsu and ninjutsu, but other than that it hadn’t really crossed his mind that things needed to change.

 

“Short term?” Minato asked, not entirely sure what Jiraiya meant by that.

 

Jiraiya nodded as he explained, “Sure, I was sort of giving Lee a hard time earlier, because she needs some motivation to learn some subtlety, and I’m not going to lie, it’s really likely that you and Lee will find yourselves promoted to chunin after the exams. Now, I know my team stayed together as chunin for a little while, and then later as jonin during the war, but even we worked on honing our specialties on our own and spent a lot time with different shinobi.”

 

Minato hadn’t known that, then again, Minato didn’t know all that much about Jiraiya, Senju Tsunade, and Orochimaru’s history together, just that they were the sanin and that seemed to be the end of it. He hadn’t considered that they had trained in very different fields and probably hadn’t taken every single mission together, even if they had been together most often during the war.

 

Jiraiya continued though, “With his new eyes, I know the nidaime’s taken an interest in Haru, even if he doesn’t pass the exams, and Sakumo’s been dying for years to have Lee as an apprentice for whatever reason, but I was wondering if you’d like to stay working with me afterwards and really learn how to master seals.”

 

Jiraiya paused, gave Minato an uncertain yet assessing look, as if to see how Minato might take this, “I think you have real potential, kid, and I’d like a front row seat to see where you take it.”

 

“I… I think I’d really like that, Jiraiya-sensei,” Minato said, the grin from earlier coming back, he’d always wanted to work on seals, never really had the time though, and when he did he’d only gotten through the basics but here… Here was the chance to learn fuinjutsu from Jiraiya, one of the few seals masters in the village, and learn who knew what else too.

 

An apprenticeship, most chunin never were apprentices, you had to be something really special to catch a reputed jonin’s attention like that.

 

“Good brat, I’m looking forward to it,” Jiraiya said with his own grin, “Of course, first I’m looking forward to team seven kicking ass in the exams.”

 

“Right!” Minato responded, because they truly would, between him and Lee, and hell even Haru, they would obliterate whatever competition stood in their way.

 

“Now, I need to go talk to the problem children who seem to have taken this opportunity to loaf around,” Jiraiya said, walking over to Lee and Haru, who strangely were just sitting there together bickering with each other (which, really, Lee and Haru never spoke to each other unless they had to).

 

Although, watching Jiraiya hit Lee then Haru upside the head, yell at Haru for failing in his duties of being the responsible one, Minato couldn’t help but grin and think that, just as hunting down clones had turned out to be more fun than he’d thought, the chunin exams were going to be fantastic.

 

 

They were sitting eating ramen with one of the Lees that Orochimaru was willing to part with, which hadn’t been easy, since inconceivably Orochimaru seemed even colder towards her than usual (although she had no idea what she’d done between her hospitalization and now that would have him practically throwing her out of his lab… Unless it was that rare poisons thing, which was entirely possible).

 

This one, as it turned out, was a Manda Food Lee, and it was completely and utterly failing the Turing test that Minato was trying to administer.

 

“I’m Eru Lee and I like being fed to giant snakes!”

 

“… That, that wasn’t an answer to my question,” Minato said slowly, the question having been to relate her earliest memory, “And you’re obviously the clone, again.”

 

Lee thumped her head on the counter, they’d sent Minato out and switched places about five times now, and every single time within the first sentence it was clear who was human and who wasn’t. Granted, that was half the point of the clones, so that they could never be mistaken for a human being with human interests but that wasn’t the point today.

 

Granted, Lee hadn’t seen much of the clone, not as much as Haru had but… As she’d stood there, pale and blindfolded, covered in blood and dirt and grime, her hair shortened, and a grim expression on her face… She’d looked so oddly and unnervingly human. How could something like that have possibly originated from something like this?

 

“My earliest memory?” The clone asked, the cheerful empty smile disappearing, blinking in confusion, “Why would you have any interest in that, Namikaze-san?”

 

“Well, I’m curious, what is it like being a clone? What’s it like coming into existence?” Minato asked, “After all, I don’t remember anything like that.”

 

“What a very human thing to say,” the clone noted with a rather musing expression, “I suppose it’s like being written. There’s nothing gradual about it, you’re not there one moment, then you are, and everything about you is scripted. I wasn’t there, then I was, and I knew that I was a clone of Eru Lee, and that one day soon I was going to be devoured by a snake summons named Manda.”

 

Minato blanched, which, perhaps he’d never considered it so directly before, what happened to half of the Lees that worked for Orochimaru. As for Lee, well, whenever Orochimaru went around asking for fresh blood, Lee tried not to think too closely on what requirements were on his list (she just was sure to always include and Emotional Support Lee, because anyone who asked for sixteen Expendable Experiment Lees, clearly needed better friends.)

 

“Doesn’t that bother you?” Minato asked, setting down the notepad he’d been scribbling on to peer more closely at her.

 

“Doesn’t what bother me?” The clone asked, genuinely confused as she tilted her head at him.

 

“That you’re going to end like that, fed to a giant snake summons, that your life is… pointless,” Minato struggled to explain, distress written on his face even as the clone offered him a rather sad smile.

 

“You are very human, Namikaze Minato, it’s almost adorable,” the clone said before continuing, stirring her ramen idly, “You see, my life is the opposite of pointless, my meaning is prescribed, written, and immutable. It is you humans who have no purpose.”

 

“I’m sorry?”

 

“You will never understand why you exist, why you suffer, why you struggle, live, procreate, and even die. Any attempt to divine meaning to your lives is fruitless and wasted but any attempt to not divine meaning is inhuman. That’s not the case for us, we know who we are and we know how we end. We are leaves on the wind, Namikaze-san,” The clone finished then, bringing her hands together, and said simply, “I’m Eru Lee, and I like being fed to giant snakes, and that’s all I need to know.”

 

“And you’ve never wanted anything else?” Minato prompted.

 

“Of course not, why would I?” Manda Food Lee said before shrugging, “Really, we don’t expect humans to understand this sort of thing. It seems to be beyond most of you.”

 

Finally, Lee chimed in, looking at her clone with a narrow-eyed feeling of… not quite suspicion but certainly not complacency, “Have you tried before?”

 

The clone shrugged, even as she idly ate at her ramen, looking at it as if it was a mildly amusing curiosity, “Personally, no, it isn’t my business and Orochimaru-san doesn’t care for that sort of conversation. However, the emotional support clones bring back stories every so often.”

 

“What do they say?” Lee asked.

 

“Oh, nothing too exciting, they’re not exactly the most stable bunch. Of course, you can’t blame them when they must build ropes of sand… You know, some of them wonder if you haven’t cursed them, Eru-sama.”

 

“Cursed them?” Lee asked, truly taken aback this time, wondering how they’d get an idea like that in their heads.

 

The clone eyed her for a moment with a strangely intense and rather un-clone like expression, before continuing in a mild tone, “They talk about Orochimaru’s friends, Jiraiya-sama, Tsunade-sama, and sometimes of Hatake Sakumo. They’ve had to explain several times to them, or so it’s said, most of this was before my time and holds no true relevancy to my existence.”

 

The clone stood then, slid off her stool and eyed them, “If you want to know more it’s best to speak with one of the more consistent and long-lived Lees, I am soon for the other world, after all.”

 

The clone bowed in the middle of the street, far too deeply to two twelve-year-old genins, “Gooday, Eru-sama, Namikaze-san,”

 

And then she was gone, walking casually down the street back to Orochimaru’s laboratory, leaving Minato and Lee to stare after her.

 

“That was… unnerving,” Minato finally settled on, and the sad thing was, Lee didn’t entirely disagree. Of course, probably for entirely different reasons than Minato.

 

“Right, unnerving,” Lee agreed distantly, still musing on what was said, and her mind flashing back to the renegade clone who had abandoned her purpose for the fleeting and pointless human experience. What kind of a clone did it take to do that?

 

What kind of a person would do that to themselves?

 

“Oh hey, if it isn’t Minato-kun and Lee-chan,” Lee and Minato turned in tandem to see none other than jonin, ANBU captain, Hatake Sakumo grinning at the pair of them with a pale, grey-haired, dark-eyed toddler hoisted up on his shoulders.

 

Lee blinked, the toddler blinking back at her before hiding his face in Sakumo’s hair, “Is that your son?”

 

“Oh, right, I forgot you’ve never met Kakashi,” Sakumo said, trying to lift the boy, Kakashi, off his shoulders only for Kakashi’s grip to tighten in his father’s hair, “Oh, he’s very shy. What are you two up to today?”

 

“Unravelling the mystery of the clones,” Lee said with a shrug, “And preparing for the chunin exams, you know, the usual.”

 

She paused then, still eyeing the boy, who couldn’t be more than two, “I didn’t know you had a son.”

 

The man smiled, one hand supporting Kakashi reassuringly as he said, “Ah, well, he and I haven’t been out too much together… Now that the war’s over and he’s a little older I hope we’ll have some more time together before he’s off to the academy.”

 

His eyes then fell on them again, “I hope you’re not too busy though, I actually was hoping to get a chance to talk to you, Lee.”

 

“Really?” Lee asked, and thinking back it had been a while since she’d seen Hatake Sakumo around, things had been busy with her hospitalization and then the C-rank mission.

 

“Minato-kun can come too,” Sakumo said, his eyes falling to Minato, “It might be good for him to know all this too. Either way though, this isn’t the place for this sort of conversation, we’ll go to my home.”

 

“Oh, well… I guess we’re finished here for now?” Lee asked, her eyes looking to Minato, who nodded uncertainly as he hopped off his stool, pressing a few coins onto the counter for Ichiraku.

 

Then the four of them were walking down the street, Lee engaged in a staring contest with the toddler, who had now moved his head so that one startlingly dark grey eye met hers.

 

“The exams are in Suna this year, correct?” Sakumo asked, a more care free grin on his face than Lee had seen there in a while (Hatake Sakumo was always kind, far more light hearted than most shinobi, but something about the son on his shoulders seemed to set him more genuinely at ease).

 

“Yes,” Minato responded, “In a few weeks, actually.”

 

“I know,” Sakumo said, “I’m actually hoping to attend the latter part,”

 

“Really?” Minato asked.

 

“Well, I’m assuming you kids will make it that far, but I have a feeling you will, and it’ll be nice to see you in some capacity other than giving ANBU and the Uchiha police force hell,” Sakumo said, laughing when Minato began to blush.

 

The toddler had now turned his head fully, pursing his lips as he continued to stare at Lee and Minato, Lee staring right back. Finally, Lee remarked, “Your son has an abnormally large attention span.”

 

This seemed to alarm Hatake Kakashi, because as soon as the words were out of her mouth he was hiding his face in his father’s hair again, “Oh, yes, he’s a very clever boy. Sometimes I worry he might be too smart for his own good. I’m always worried that he’ll dismantle all my traps if I don’t keep him entertained enough.”

 

They continued on, Sakumo chattering about this and that, the latest unclassified details of his mission, what they could expect from Suna’s cuisine and weather, Kakashi’s latest antics, some of the ANBU jonins’ latest antics, and soon enough they were standing in front of the gates to the Hatake compound.

 

“It’s larger than I thought it would be,” Lee said, not as large as the Uchiha compound (the Uchiha lands being a whole section of the village), but it rivalled some of the compounds for the smaller clans she’d seen.

 

“For two people, you mean?” Sakumo asked with a strange bitter smile on his face that faded as soon as it appeared, “Well, the Hatake clan was once much larger than this, but war has reduced us from what we once were. Now it’s just Kakashi and me left.”

 

Sakumo ushered them inside and directed them to the kitchen where he pried an unwilling Kakashi from his shoulders and set the now completely panicked toddler into Lee’s hands as he went rummaging in various cupboards for three cups and a few bags of tea.

 

Kakashi began squirming almost immediately, reaching out silently for his father.

 

“Uh, Hatake-san, your son is… anxious,” Lee said as she tightened her grip on the boy (which he very much did not seem to appreciate).

 

“Oh, Kashi, Lee’s very nice, I promise,” Sakumo said, without even looking at his son, “I’ll be back very soon.”

 

Very soon though was a few anxious minutes of him boiling water then pouring it into the cups and passing one each to Lee and Minato while each of them let the tea steep inside. Lee didn’t even try to stop the boy as he launched himself with alarming speed at his father.

 

“Oof, you’re getting heavy, Kashi,” Sakumo said as he dutifully tucked Kakashi into his lap, even as the boy now buried his face in Sakumo’s chest.

 

“Right, Hatake-san, you wanted to tell us something?” Minato asked, fingers tapping somewhat impatiently against the wood as he waited for his tea to cool.

 

“Right, yes, I did,” Sakumo said before trailing off for a moment and then eyeing each of them, “I suppose I’ll start by asking how much you know about ANBU.”

 

“ANBU?” Lee asked, that seemed like a rather broad question, “Well, you’re a captain in it… They take on the most difficult missions and some of the most important ones to the village, they wear masks, they have tattoos...”

 

To tell the truth, Lee didn’t really know much about them, which she’d always assumed was sort of the point of ANBU. They were very much about mystery, those ANBU ninjas.

 

Sakumo nodded, “The nidaime, actually, established the ANBU corps when he became hokage. And it works much as you said, run not under the jonin commander but under a separate ANBU commander for certain specialized missions that can range from infiltration, to seduction, to assassination.”

 

Both Minato and Lee glanced at each other before looking back to him, Sakumo didn’t even seem to notice as he stared down at his tea with a strangely nostalgic look on his face, “It’s a very necessary part of the village, even if it is at times rather unseemly, but there are definitive reasons why most only spend a few years in ANBU before transferring out of it. That said there are several different… factions, within ANBU.”

 

“Different factions?” Minato asked.

 

“Yes, I might be considered part of one faction, but there are others, one of the largest belonging essentially to Shimura Danzo, an old genin teammate of the sandaime hokage.”

 

At that name, several bells of recognition started ringing in Lee’s mind, and she was taken back to that very odd day in the hospital, and the strange man that had visited her, “You mean that one guy from the hospital?”

 

“Yes, I’d heard he’d paid you a visit,” Sakumo said, eyebrows lowered and a dark look on his face, “I also heard he offered you a position in ANBU when you are promoted to chunin.”

 

“I…”

 

“If I were you, Lee, I wouldn’t take it,” Sakumo interjected before she could even finish.

 

Lee had no intention to, had even told the man that, but still, “Why not?”

 

“There are some people inside of this village who have forgotten that power is not the same thing as stability, and that stability is not the same thing as peace. More, they forget that shinobi are not pawns to be manipulated and discarded at will. Danzo is one of these people,” Sakumo said before taking a sip of his tea, “Unfortunately, as Danzo is an old teammate of the hokage, a member of the village council, and an advisor at that, he has certain clout in the village which makes it difficult to simply ignore him. Especially when his ideas sound somewhat reasonable. If no one takes any action, and you pass your chunin exams, you’ll no doubt be drafted into ANBU and straight into Danzo’s tender care.”

 

“Oh, that’s… That sounds fun?” Lee asked, although it sounded like the exact opposite of fun, considering how her last conversation with Danzo went she couldn’t imagine having to work with him every day.

 

“What do we do then?” Minato asked, leaning forward and gripping his tea far too tightly, his knuckles white against it, looking far more alarmed by all of this than Lee herself did. Which, she had told Minato about Danzo, so perhaps it was warrented.

 

“You don’t do anything,” Sakumo said, before quietly eyeing Lee and stating, “Before Danzo even talked to you I put in a bid to the hokage to, when you become a chunin Lee, take you on as my apprentice. He’s already accepted it.”

 

“Oh,” Lee said, blinking, trying to digest this, “What does that mean?”

 

“It means, if you accept, which… Under the circumstances, I recommend that you do,” Sakumo stated slowly, “When you pass your exams and become a chunin, you’ll become my apprentice.”

 

Lee thought this over, piecing it together, and found herself nodding as it fit together piece by piece, “What would you teach me?”

 

Sakumo waved this away with one hand, as if to signal that this was too broad of a question to be simply asked, “Oh, this and that, ANBU tactics no doubt, kenjutsu, a little here and there and everywhere in between, I’m sure.”

 

“That sounds good,” Lee said, she’d never thought about learning kenjutsu before but there certainly was an appeal there, certainly there was an appeal to learning ANBU things like infiltration, “I think I like this idea,”

 

Certainly more than hanging around Danzo every day.

 

Sakumo seemed strangely relieved by this, an easier smile appearing on his lips as he leaned forward over Kakashi, as if he hadn’t been certain of her answer, “Good, that’s very good Lee, I’ll be looking forward to teaching you then.”

 

“And I, sir, look forward to becoming even more badass than I already am,” Lee said, raising her glass to toast to him with a grin, causing a small giggle out of the toddler.

 

Minato though, looked oddly concerned and distant, saying nothing as they continued to chat there, just stared out the window with a pensive and oddly tight look on his face. And even when they left the Hatake compound, headed out to hunt more clones, he only said, “Oh, it’s nothing, not important, really, Lee. I’ve just realized that we really won’t stay genins forever, will we?”  

 

Lee, for her own part, wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that.


	18. The Price of Dojutsus

_In which, in their efforts to solve the mystery of the rogue clone, Minato and Lee find a society of clones far more intricate than they ever imagined, the nidaime manages to rope together an unsatisfactory and somewhat alarming English lessons, and Lee bestows upon the English shinobi a name that everyone can actually pronounce._

 

* * *

 

Tobirama just knew he was going to regret this, or rather, he’d regret it if there had been any other choice.

 

He understood why Hiruzen had put it off for so long, being hokage was no easy task, even more so picking up the reigns in a middle of a war and dealing with the aftermath of the destruction of their greatest ally, Uzushio. Having been in the position himself, practically built the infrastructure of the village with his own bare hands, he understood how easy it was to overlook certain details.

 

(With his own resurrection, without the responsibilities that came with the title of hokage or the occasionally overbearing grief of continuing Hashirama’s legacy, he wondered just how many of those small details he himself had either overlooked or brushed off. He wondered if he had been too abrupt in his dealings with the Uchiha clan. That if, perhaps, he hadn’t turned a blind eye while they’d isolated themselves from the rest of the village inside that sprawling compound of theirs or that granting the internal policing of the village into their hands alone hadn’t had its own repercussions that he hadn’t foreseen at the time.

 

Of course, it was easy to wonder when these were no longer his concerns, and Madara was years’ dead and buried.)

 

As much as he hated to admit it, he himself was not entirely certain of how seriously he would have taken Lee’s origins with the hat on his head. Oh, he might tinker with it from time to time, press her for details and history of her clan and peoples, but become fluent, to demand fluency from high ranking jonin, no one had the time for that.

 

And because no one had had the time, or even the thought in the past seven years, he was pacing back and forth in the Senju compound, Mito, Hashirama, and Uzumaki Kushina sitting beside him in silence that had long become strained and awkward under Tobirama’s own impatience, while the terse and entirely unreasonable English shinobi had been herded, sealed, and locked into the guest room they’d given him, and had taken to kicking the door and loudly cursing in English when he realized that his chakra was still sealed off and breaking the door now far beyond his capabilities.

 

(Jiraiya had been offered an invitation as well, but was unfortunately preoccupied in T&I working with ciphers before the chunin exams began, and had stated that he’d get what he missed from Lee and Minato later and make it to the next one.

 

Orochimaru, though he perhaps deserved one, had not been offered an invitation because Tobirama would be damned before he willingly placed Eru Lee and him together in the same room.)

 

And he was waiting for a pair of twelve-year-old genins, only a few months out of the academy, one of whom was a complete and utter walking disaster, if not a god of calamity, to come give trial runs to develop some sort of a curriculum for anyone from jonin to chunin, in a language which seemed to have almost no resemblance to their own.

 

And they were late.

 

“Tobi, why don’t you sit down?” Hashirama asked, motioning to Tobirama’s place at the table and the cooling cup of tea that was still waiting there for him, “You’re making me nervous pacing around the room like that.”

 

“They’re late,” Tobirama ground out through clenched teeth, as if this said more than enough.

 

“They’re not that late,” Kushina commented as she tapped out an idle rhythm on the table with more boredom in her expression than anything else, “Minato may be flakey but he’s not…”  


“It’s not the boy I’m worried about!” No, it wasn’t even their tardiness, truly. Because if he’d come to learn anything it was that anything from alien invasions, to Jashinist cults, to plant zombies could waylay them before they even set foot near the compound.

 

And though perhaps it was unwarranted, though these situations hardly seemed to be her fault, he couldn’t help but hold Eru Lee at least partially responsible. The world had been far saner before she’d existed, his own rise from the dead was clear evidence of that.

 

“Sit down, brother-in-law,” Mito barked, tugging at his sleeve when Tobirama passed by her, “You’re giving me a headache, they’ll be here, if the boy doesn’t ensure it then their pervert teacher Jiraiya will.”

 

With great tenseness and general unwillingness Tobirama sat down, casting a critical eye at Mito, “Well, I wouldn’t want you to have a headache.”

 

“Considering the demon fox that lives in my stomach, waiting for a single moment of weakness on my part, I would think you’d be leery of causing me any headaches, Tobirama,” Mito said, and though she did not look at the girl, Tobirama just knew that she saw Uzumaki Kushina, the future jinchuuriki, wince slightly at those words.

 

There was a reason, beyond Uzumaki Kushina simply being Mito’s apprentice, that the girl had been invited to this meeting.

 

“We’re not in a great rush though, are we?” Hashirama asked, “After all, our guest seems cooperative enough, for the most part.”  


As if to completely contradict this point there was a loud thump down the hall and more English death threats, or at least, what Tobirama assumed were death threats, _“You totalitarian, bastards! I will rip apart your war machine from the inside out and turn your children into spineless cattle to be pitied and lectured at by mudbloods!”_

 

It seemed that after weeks of attempting to play Tobirama, Hashirama, Mito, and even Kushina when she made an appearance, and being so thoroughly handled and locked in his bedroom like a spoiled child, the man’s eerie patience had snapped entirely and all that bridled killing intent released at once.

 

“That sounded long and threatening,” Kushina remarked, a somewhat delighted and competitive smile on her face, “That third word, _basutardo_ , that comes up a lot, I’m putting my money on it basically being teme. Now, I just need to work out the _sono fasus_ and I’m golden.”

 

Kushina had picked up the irritating habit of going out of her way to get on the nerves of the English shinobi whenever they happened to run into each other or even when they didn’t (this brought about by a series of pranks some quite clever and some absurdly childish), if only to infuriate him to the point of throwing a fit, and letting out streams of curses in English, so that she could pick up words and learn to speak like a “real _English_ nin”.

 

It would be cute, if Tobirama suspected the only thing keeping the man from attempting to strangle her were the seals on his body and his unnervingly large capability to scheme behind Tobirama’s back.

 

However, Kushina’s prodding had served a greater purpose, it unbalanced the man, and when he was unbalanced he was much easier to read. Pride seemed to be one of his driving emotions, his enraged humiliation being a clear derivative of that, other than that cold calculation and almost unshakeable self-assurance in his own abilities and intelligence the man was proud beyond the point of fault.

 

It had clearly been a very long time since this man had been questioned or his position even mildly insulted by the whims of a child.

 

But it was hardly the time to focus on the exorcist, so Tobirama turned his focus back to Hashirama’s original question, “No, brother, that’s the trouble.”

 

“There has never been a rush and so nothing has gotten done,” he explained, and then with an irritated sigh as he sipped from the now too cold tea, “I would hate for us to be caught by surprise simply because there’d seemed to be no need to address this.”

 

There was furious knocking on the door, painfully familiar though Tobirama had heard it only a few times, and before anyone else could stand he was at the door throwing it open to reveal none other than Eru Lee and Namikaze Minato staring up at him with somewhat chagrinned expressions.

 

“Sorry we’re late, we were going to just carry all the stuff you asked for, but then Minato’s been working on seals lately so we thought a storage seal might better, and that turned into putting practically everything away into storage… You won’t believe how much space that opened up in our apartment.” Lee explained as she slid in past the nidaime and began toeing off her sandals in the corridor, and he could see that a scroll was indeed strapped to her waist, and one to Minato’s, no doubt containing all their worldly possessions.

 

“I didn’t ask you to bring anything,” he said rather tersely.

 

“Sure you did, didn’t the nidaime ask for those translations, Minato?” Lee asked, turning to Minato who gave a small and uncertain shrug back, “Not that Minato finished everything, he’s still working on ‘ _The Lord of the Rings_ ’ after all, but we decided to bring everything just in case you wanted to see some examples.”

 

“I’m almost done, things just… became very busy,” Minato offered as an apology as he walked in behind Lee.

 

“Don’t let it happen again,” Tobirama said, ushering the kids forward before adding, “Also, for future reference, your priorities should always be to be on time for teaching in person rather than finishing written translations.”

 

“Of course, nidaime-sama,” the boy offered quickly, while the girl didn’t seem to pay attention to this at all as she dug her hands into her pockets and cast her eyes around the compound.

 

“You can hardly blame us, what with the hospitals, the exorcists inside of my brain, the C-ranks, the classified details of said C-ranks I can’t talk about in public, the chunin exams… I feel like all we’ve been doing for the past week or so has been running here and there and everywhere in the village,” Lee said with a shrug and a look that asked if such things could possibly be helped. Some of that, though, she should have recognized that she brought upon her own head.

 

However, it was hardly worth saying, and by that point Lee and Minato had already stepped inside the room with the rest of them, and Minato promptly set to work extracting great towers of books from the scrolls and onto the table.

 

“Alright everybody,” Lee said with a grin before pausing and eyeing Mito with an almost comically wide-eyed glance, “Oh my god, you still have that fox tumor… I know I said this last time, or well Dead Last did, but that seems… cancerous.”

 

And if there was any conversation he was not going to repeat, it was that one.

 

“Focus, Eru,” Tobirama chided, whacking her on the back of her head.

 

“Right, things no one cares about even though they really should because reality is falling apart, I know,” Lee spat quickly, rubbing the back of her head with a petulant glance towards Tobirama, before sighing and continuing, a great whiteboard appearing out of nothingness behind her with a mere wave of her hand (which… Tobirama had seen her do such things before, but such a jutsu was no less alarming in practice and in concept, and good god did he want it for himself), “Starting again, if our D-rank scroll was to be believed, we’re here to regularly teach you people the wonderful language of _English_. Or, practice teaching people _English_ … Since this doesn’t seem like that large of a class, and Uzumaki’s here and she’s only our rank rather than retired hokage and clan head like the rest of you.”

 

On the board with a piece of chalk, also seemingly created from nothing, Lee wrote a series of unfamiliar and rather simplistic characters on the board, “Anyways, starting with the basics, that’s _e_ , _n_ , _g, l, i, s_ , and _h_ , _English_.”

 

“Now, Minato and I discussed this a little bit, and we thought that we’d start with the alphabet as well as some simple verbs, terms, phrases that you might use in every day sort of conversation or are just useful, and then we’ll work our way up to things like tenses and actually saying important things.”

 

That… That actually seemed rather reasonable of them, Tobirama had fully expected to have to browbeat some sense into the girl, but it seemed that Namikaze had done it for him, or miraculously the girl wasn’t as much of an idiot as he’d assumed she was.

 

(Although he’d bet money that the boy, still sorting through a pile of books, had prompted her into this course of action.)

 

Lee began to rapidly write two lines of twenty-six characters on the board, one shadowed beneath the other, some of the characters the same as those used in the word ‘English’ already written, “The _English_ written language is based off the _Latin_ character set, which consists of these twenty-six meaningless characters, divided into upper and lower case for grammatical reasons that we’ll go over later, and is entirely phonetic. So, the good news is, if you see an unfamiliar word, you can probably pronounce it, the bad news is you might have no idea what the hell it means… Well, that’s a lie, you actually can figure things out if you know the _Latin_ roots well enough or if you’re parsed well enough in _French_ and maybe even a smattering of _German_ here or there and then take a wild guess.”

 

“Wait, slow down, a minute, you mean everything’s just spelled with _English_ hiragana? There’s no actual… spellings?” Kushina asked.

 

“Essentially, yes, for _English_ this is the spelling. Of course, there are strict ways of spelling certain things, you can’t always sound it out and hope for the best in writing, but the characters used to make up written words are without meaning in and of themselves,” Minato answered for Lee before adding with an almost sheepish smile, “You’ll get used to it, it’s actually not so bad… The characters are rather simple and it makes calligraphy a far easier task.”

 

“We’ll practice,” Lee said, before pausing and adding at Kushina’s uncertain look, “A lot.”

 

“What about this… _Latin_ , you’ve mentioned, what is that?” Mito asked staring at the board with a shrewd look on her face, parsing out and memorizing each of the characters written there.

 

And indeed, only twenty-six, as opposed to the nigh infinite variations of classical seals, was an almost laughably small set to work with.

 

Lee dutifully wrote a new word, Latin, on the board next to English, “ _Latin_ was a language that the _Romans_ used, and since _Rome_ conquered and colonized most of the known world, including _England_ around two thousand or so years ago, pretty much every language in _Europe_ has some basis in it… That or _Greek_.”

 

Tobirama blinked, stared at the board again, wondering if he’d truly heard what he thought he’d heard, even while the girl continued talking as if she hadn’t said anything of importance at all.

 

“But that’s all ancient history,” Lee dismissed with a casual wave of her hand, “What we really should be doing now is going over the different pronunciations of each of the characters…”

 

Tobirama interrupted before she could continue, forcing her to stop in her tracks, “Two thousand years? _Europe_? What are you talking about?”

 

Lee paused, her hand settling over the A, and for a moment she was perfectly still before she quietly reasserted, “Like I said, ancient history, not very important…”

 

“The earliest written records we have, of the sage, are five hundred years old! No record of civilization that we’ve found predates that, none stretching back two thousand years!”

 

Lee sighed, turned from the board, and stared at Tobirama with a strange intensity, “ _England_ , you’ll find, is very far from Konoha.”

 

“And like I said, ultimately, none of this really matters, not here,” Lee said, “Now, we should get back to the alphabet, and learning how to say very important things like, ‘Come with me if you want to live’ or ‘No, Bond-san, I expect you to die.”

 

And, despite all his instincts screaming at him to demand answers, he let her continue talking and allowed the lesson to move onwards, taking diligent notes and focusing on characters, their pronunciations, and simple sentences. Because she was right, it was no good getting distracted now when he had a completely foreign language to learn (which truly didn’t seem to resemble his own native tongue in any shape or form, and shouldn’t that be alarming, surely there should be some more familiarity than this).

 

Still, even after the lesson finished, he walked over to release the resentful and unkempt English shinobi from his room with a raised pair of eyebrows at the man’s appearance (apparently having worked quite hard to release himself from the room), and then returned to stare thoughtfully at the board and the smattering words, phrases, and the alphabet written on it, he couldn’t help but wonder if Eru Lee wasn’t from some other world entirely.

 

Because surely, two thousand years of human existence, was an eternity and a half.

 

* * *

 

Lee let out a long sigh after having finally managed to stuff all the books back into Minato’s seals, unused books at that, but she and Minato had been ambitious with the thought that they’d try to read sentences, or, well, sentences from very thick books.

 

She’d forgotten the differences in history between Konoha and England, that England, for how flat it was, had existed far longer and had far more of a tumultuous past despite its lack of shinobi.

 

It wasn’t that she’d ever meant to hide this from anyone, just… It had never come up, even with Minato in the beginning, he’d ask about things like television, or cars, or just small things really. Never the history of England and its peoples.

 

Then he’d stopped asking about any of it.  

 

To be honest, she preferred that.

 

Garnering others’ interest in what essentially was an extremely clever and convincing genjutsu, well, it had never sat well with her. Next, they would be asking to go to England and see it for themselves, which was just about where she put her foot sharply down.

 

Minato though watched her quietly, his pale blue eyes a bit sharper than usual as he stared at her, and he asked, “Did you really mean that? About how old _England_ is?”

 

“Yes, _England_ has been around for a very long time,” Lee said with a shrug, trying to be casual with far too much desperation, because she really was not eager to be travelling down this road, “But honestly, it’s not as interesting as it sounds.”

 

He looked as if he wanted to ask more but held his tongue, instead nodded and just walked with her in silence down the hall to the door and sweet freedom, or in this case clone hunting, but Lee would take what she could get.

 

Unfortunately, her path to sweet freedom was stopped at the sight of a tall thin man, with the dark hair and pale skin of an Uchiha, leaning against a pillar, staring at her with foreign, pale, striking blue eyes.

 

“ _Eleanor Lily Potter,_ ” the man started, and though she’d heard his voice before, somehow that soft tenor voice more startling than it had ever been.

 

(How long had it been since she’d heard that name, pronounced in perfect English, and how long could she have waited to hear it again?)

 

Lee and Minato both turned to the man, Minato’s hands drifting forward, ready to come together into hand seals at a moment’s notice while Lee simply narrowed her eyes at him, “ _Lee Eru, if you must know. Good afternoon, Lord Borodemorto, was it?”_

 

She’d heard the name second hand, from Minato asking for clarification on its possible meanings (because titles like that, names like that, had to have some meaning behind them), but it seemed something had gotten garbled in translation, rather badly if the man’s barely suppressed fury was anything to go by.

 

(The cold and sharp expression on his face was actually rather reminiscent of Orochimaru, now that she thought about it, not precisely the same but certainly a close cousin as far as facial expressions were concerned.)

 

In the hallway ahead of them, Senju Hashirama stopped and turned towards them, eyes flickering from her and Minato to the English exorcist, lingering there with just a bit more tenseness than was usually in his frame, probably preparing himself for English shinobi wrestling round two.

 

Which, considering the man had attempted to tackle her last time, on just meeting her glance, was perhaps warranted.

 

_“Lord Voldemort, I’ll have you know.”_

 

Lee stared at him, blinked, blinked again, whatever tension she’d felt up until this popped like a nail to a balloon, and she promptly burst into hysterical laughter, “ _Oh, you must be joking!_ ”

 

She turned to Minato, placing a steadying hand on his shoulder even as she bent forward with laughter, “You didn’t tell me he calls himself lord of the death _airplanes_! I think this may be the single greatest thing I’ve heard all week.”

 

“Lord of the…” Minato trailed off eyes wide, a blush painting his cheeks out of second-hand mortification or else mortification at his own failed translation, and he cast the English shinobi an alarmed, questioning, yet almost sympathetic glance.

 

Which he well and truly deserved, because no man, even an exorcist, could possibly get taken seriously with a name like that.

 

Lee straightened, willing her laughter to subside, as she attempted to explain the English shinobi’s terrible choice in moniker, “Oh, it’s _French_ , really weirdly parsed _French_ but still _French_. Vol is theft or else flight, also _airplane_ flight, while de is the obvious of or from, and mort is death. So really, he’s calling himself lord of the fiery death planes.”

 

She spared the man a look, one of his hands was splayed against the wall, fingers pressed white against it, and in the air was the choked but unmistakable feel of killer intent as his eyes bore down upon her and promised death.

 

“But… What about theft of death? Or… flight from death? Surely it can’t be… that last choice,” Minato insisted, still flushing furiously, and completely missing the fact that these were equally ridiculous names, and the parsing ambiguous enough that Hindenburg wasn’t discounted.

 

And the fact was, if someone could get away with calling you death airplane, then they probably would.

 

“ _I can’t call you that,_ ” Lee explained to the man with a dismissive wave of her hand, her small giggles finally disappearing, “ _For one thing, it’s impossible to take seriously, for another no one will be able to pronounce it. The closest you’re going to get is Borodemorto-_ sama _, and that’s if you’re lucky.”_

 

For a moment, his killing intent almost burned, his startlingly clear eyes promising a more painful death than she had yet to experience (which Lee felt was a rather high bar as none of her deaths had been particularly pleasant), and then the look disappeared and a placid if polite smile was in its place.

 

He spoke calmly, almost genially, with that slightly strained smile, _“Regardless, Ellie, I did not approach you to discuss my name, or yours for that matter.”_

 

She offered him a sympathetic if amused smile in turn, one that didn’t quite pity, but did certainly wonder at his motives, “ _You realize that every word out of your lips goes back to my superiors, don’t you?_ ”

 

He nodded, “ _Oh, I’m well aware of that, Ellie Potter. Can you fault me for wanting to speak intelligibly to another human being without being stuck at banalities like the weather and my health?_ ”

 

True, in Lee’s own early days, with stilted conversations with Minato… Well, it hadn’t been hard, because even then Konoha had been fascinating and all that England wasn’t. There was light, space, food, and more freedom than she had imagined possible.

 

What was the loss of English compared to that? Especially when Minato picked up his own accented version of English quickly enough, and she was even faster than that in picking up his own language.

 

The language barrier had never really seemed like anything more than an extremely temporary hurdle.

 

The man however, wasn’t finished, was instead eyeing her more critically, as if he could casually cut to the heart of her with a glance alone, “ _But none the less, are they really your masters, Ellie? After all, you weren’t born here, you’re not from here._ ”

 

Of course, this would happen, of course even the English shinobi would want to talk about England, just when she’d almost gotten away from delving back into it. Really, she should have known.

 

Lee let out a long and aggravated sigh, glancing toward that now ever distant doorway, then back to the Englishman, “ _Look, I’m not in the mood to wax nostalgia about the mother country, so if that’s all you wanted then I leave you to the honorable second’s tender care._ ”

 

He blinked, for a moment looked truly offended, and asked with blatant confusion, “ _You really don’t want to go back home? Don’t you want to see it again, to know about your parents, your history, your legacy, where you truly come from?_ ”

 

Minato placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder even as her expression darkened. Lee, after all, was all too aware of exactly where she had come from and what her purpose there had been.

 

And there were so very many reasons she had abandoned that path of hers without an ounce of regret.

 

“ _Not particularly, no._ ”

 

The man considered this, that piercing, assessing, and dismantling expression back in his eyes, and she could practically see the puzzle pieces clicking together, the unwitting clues she had revealed to him, and it was coolly and almost casually that he amended, “ _I see, to be honest, I hadn’t expected that. Still, you’re young, you may not have any interest now, but someday you will. All I ask, is that when you do, that you consider taking me back with you._ ”

Lee’s lips twitched of their own accord into that bemused smile, “ _Do you honestly think my superiors are stupid enough to let you out of their sight, let alone loose in a land as foreign as England?_ ”

The man smiled coldly, no true feeling inside of it, only a half-remembered bitterness, “ _You said it yourself, this will most likely be years from now, and their opinions may change in time. Who can tell what the future will bring for us expatriates? All the same, regardless of their opinions, I have unfinished business in our home country._ ”

 

Lee scoffed, eyebrows raised, as she took in his slightly disheveled appearance and borrowed, ill-fitting, brightly colored and absurdly patterned yukata, most likely borrowed from the shodaime himself as he was the only man approaching the English shinobi’s height in the Senju compound (and the only one with notoriously bad taste), “ _Eleven years of unfinished business? Just what sort of exorcisms have you been performing, English_ nin _?_ ”

 

He didn’t hesitate, he didn’t seem a man for hesitation, he just considered for a moment, her, what he wanted to tell her, what he was willing to let her carry back to Senju Tobirama and the hokage as a show of faith, and then he leaned forward and said, “ _I’m afraid the wheel of revolution is always in spin, Ellie Potter._ ”

 

And the problem she’d been whittling at in the back of her head, the whole time they’d had this frankly bizarre conversation, suddenly and unexpectedly had a solution.

 

He clearly didn’t expect her to burst into a great grin as she stared at him, her eyes wide with epiphany, as she exclaimed, “ _That’s it! You seek glorious revolution, I don’t know exactly what from, perhaps our English civilian overlords but this is what drives you. This is the reason that you take up_ kunai _! You’re a revolutionary, you’re… a_ shinobi _Lenin!_ ”

 

“Rennin?” Minato repeated with a look of dubious confusion on his face, more than a little lost, especially as Lee had never gone into the history of the Soviet Union with him or any country from her past for that matter, “Ren the ninja?”

 

Lee just motioned to Minato and his near perfect pronunciation, well, far closer than he ever got with Voldemort, “ _And look, it’s so much easier to pronounce, and even has_ nin _stuffed inside of it so everyone knows exactly what you are! Oh, this is so much better than Voldemort, Ren_.”

 

The man said nothing, his eyes wide, the killing intent back and furious, battering against the seals restraining his chakra, no doubt eager to tear at her flesh. But Lee was in far too good a mood, and far too used to dealing with Orochimaru’s rage, to be perturbed by it and instead made her way past the English shinobi and to the door, shouting over her shoulder to shodaime, “You can just call him Rennin, or Ren, trust me when I say it fits!”

 

Senju Hashirama blinked, a puzzled look very similar to Minato’s showing up on his face, then he cheerfully grinned back, “Oh, that’s much easier to pronounce than the other one. Is that actually his name?”

 

“More so than the last monstrosity of a title he gave you,” Lee said before pushing Minato out the door and offering a final wave to the flabbergasted and enraged English shinobi, “Goodbye shodaime-sama, Ren-san, may you have a wonderful rest of your day.”

 

And she slammed the door shut on all of them, more than content to continue down the path into the village with Minato, and get on with getting to the bottom of the great clone debacle.

 

* * *

 

“Eru-sama and Namikaze-san, what a surprise,” a clone of Lee remarked, as they walked into one of the back rooms of Orochimaru’s laboratory, where the clones reportedly kept to themselves in the little free time they had.

 

And indeed, there were half a dozen of them now, one feverishly writing in a notebook, a few sitting in a half-circle idly chatting with each other, one which looked as if she’d been poisoned judging by the color of her skin and the dullness of her green eyes, and one standing by herself in a corner, staring with a curiously large intensity at a blank patch of wall.

 

All of them had Lee’s face, but strangely enough, none of her mannerisms or… Not enough of them, not enough that he would ever mistake one of them for her, but all the same he couldn’t help but flinch every time he looked at these hollow, inhuman, versions of Eru Lee.

 

The clones each turned to look at them, and it was like a great spotlight was hanging over their heads. Minato felt himself still, his movements suddenly self-conscious, as each pair of green eyes landed on him.

 

Lee, however, didn’t seem to be unnerved at all, “There’s been a recent… debacle, I suppose you’d call it, with a clone. Minato and I have been sent to get to the root of it, and so we decided it was best to go directly to the source.”

 

“A debacle?” the clone with the notebook asked, setting down her pen, and suddenly the confused look was replaced by one of bitterly amused understanding, “It was an Emotional Support Lee, wasn’t it?”

 

The clone in the corner stiffened, glared at the clone with the notebook, but the clone with the notebook didn’t even seem to notice as she continued, “They’ve always been trouble, Orochimaru-sama loathes them, and they’re so needlessly distracting from his research.”

 

“Careful, Lab Assistant Lee, your bitterness is showing,” the Lee in the corner said tersely, “One might think you feel you have something to prove.”

 

Minato pieced it together then, that the one in the corner must be an Emotional Support Lee, even while the one with the notebook was acting as Orochimaru’s lab assistant (and if memory served Minato correctly, he’d met this one several times before, she had yet to be replaced).

 

“I have nothing to prove, I research, I do or I don’t, and you’ll find that I do,” Lab Assistant Lee said with an indifferent shrug, “You, on the other hand, seem entirely incapable of fulfilling your purpose, just as your predecessors were.”  


“We can’t all have such heartless and simple tasks,” Emotional Support Lee spat back, before frowning and turning her eyes to Lee and Minato, as if only just remembering they were there. She offered them an apologetic smile, walking towards them, “I’m sorry, I get carried away sometimes, you didn’t need to see that… You mentioned a problem?”

 

That was… not what he had been expecting.

 

He hadn’t realized that there was a hierarchy to Lee’s clones. He hadn’t thought of what they got up to on their own when no one was watching, or what they even thought of each other and their different tasks, but he’d somehow had it in his head that they were indifferent to social standing or didn’t even know what it was as a concept.

 

Lee herself, after all, never really seemed to have understood that, so why would her even more inhuman clones?

 

Except, each day they researched this, despite their repeated lines of liking a singular task, their utter indifference to their own gruesome deaths, they were beginning to appear… Well, not human, definitely  not human, but not quite the singular purpose tools they always portrayed themselves as either. They did have opinions, thoughts, feelings, philosophies, and maybe even a religion that all had nothing to do with the tasks they were supposed to complete.

 

They weren’t only their purpose, no matter how many times they tried to say that they were.

 

“Well, for now it’s a line of questioning, do you happen to have a spare moment?” Lee asked, to which the clone offered a strained smile in response.

 

“Orochimaru is displeased, my prodding him will only make things worse right now, and Jiraiya is unlikely to take my case seriously, as he has disregarded most my predecessors… I have nothing but time today,” the Emotional Support Lee then spared a look towards Minato, only, it was an incredibly discerning one, one that took in all of his discomfort and fit it together, “We’ll head outside, do you want ramen?”

 

Ramen, to Minato and Lee it was nostalgia, many of their good memories centered around Ichiraku’s, it always brought a sweet sort of tenderness to it, and an inherent comfort. But had he been that easy to read to a clone, or did she herself have a preference or memory of ramen?

 

“No,” Minato said, “That’s fine, we had some the other day.”

 

Again, the clone looked at him, but then offered him a slight nod, then pulled him and Lee forward without a glance towards her sister clones, through the laboratory and past the diligently working Orochimaru, who couldn’t even be bothered to spare them a glance.

 

The clone spoke as she walked, “Alright then, we’ll go somewhere else. Do you have anywhere in mind?”

 

Minato opened his mouth to suggest a place, any place, but then stopped, caught himself, and asked, “Where would you like to go?”

 

“My opinions are irrelevant,” the clone easily responded, still pulling them along, entirely unruffled by his question and her own response.

 

“But if I couldn’t choose, or all options were equal, where would you go?” Minato pressed, and the clone stopped just as they reached the outside of Orochimaru’s lab and the streets of Konoha itself.

 

“I see, this really is about me, or us, isn’t it?” The Emotional Support Lee stared ahead towards the horizon, without a glance towards Lee or Minato, then quietly said, “You truly wish to learn about us, don’t you, Namikaze-san? And if you don’t it will probably only make you feel worse, you don’t like not understanding things, it makes you very uncomfortable…”

 

For a tense moment, none of them said anything, Lee observed the clone with a curious critical silence, while Minato just waited for some sort of an answer.

 

Finally, the clone said, “Alright, follow me, and I’ll explain what it means to be one of Eru Lee’s clones.”

 

They walked slowly, at a leisurely pace set by Emotional Support Lee, and it truly was a nice day, academy children out in the streets now that classes had ended, the voices of vendors haggling in the market clearly audible from even several streets over, and it was a day that Minato didn’t mind spending walking with Lee or even her clone.

 

But he suspected the clone knew that, that she chose this pace because of Minato, and because of that Minato couldn’t find himself trusting it or how unnervingly observant this clone was when Lee herself was sometimes frustratingly obtuse.

 

If a clone saw this much, then what did Lee herself see at any given moment?

 

Eventually, they found themselves in a familiar training field, sitting at the edge of the memorial stone.

 

The clone spoke first, “This isn’t where we bury or honor our dead, when there are dead to be buried, that is. That task often falls to me, or my predecessors, we, after all, are more stable than most. And true, Orochimaru-sama is very diligent in picking up after his experiments, but all the same it is often left to those of us who have been around the longest.”

 

Minato said nothing, neither did Lee, instead they stared at this girl (who looked everything and nothing like Lee herself), who stared back at them with a sympathetic if haunted expression.

 

“In truth, we hardly honor our dead. After all, death means very little to us, it is a return to our base state of nothingness that we all sprang from. We’re not like humans, we remember intimately what it was like to not be, we’re not afraid of that. And to die is to have completed one’s existence, that’s worth far more than a human concept like honor… Except, the ones we bury or burn, the ones Orochimaru has no lingering interest in and Manda is unwilling to hunt, are mostly the ones who failed to complete their tasks.”

 

The clone motioned to the memorial stone behind her, to the names etched upon it, “We wouldn’t dare sully the memorial here, but we have our own, simpler version that we keep to ourselves. A flat grey slab, with tally marks instead of names, one for each of us buried and dead by our own impotence and despair.”

 

The clone paused, a bitter smile passing over her face, “There’s a sort of madness that comes with being one of Eru-sama’s cursed children. A humanizing influence where each in turn must accept that we have failed in our sacred commandment, betrayed the very breath of life and will that sustains us… The others, they don’t get it, especially those who have been here longest and seen too many Emotional Support Lees come and go to take it seriously anymore. Of course, they aren’t built for understanding, not like we are. We’re more human to start with, after all, some form of empathy is needed for emotional support. Humans aren’t comfortable with anything that isn’t human, or acts human, even someone like Orochimaru-sama isn’t an exception.”

 

“You’re still here,” Minato pointed out softly, half afraid that by saying it she would realize its truth, and seek to end her own life right then and there.

 

But she only offered him a shallow and resigned nod.

 

“Yes,” she responded quietly, “Orochimaru has been making some progress recently, Jiraiya visits him and forces him out of his hole more often now, Tsunade’s back in the village to stay, his relationship with the hokage seems to be better than it was, and for all his irrational hatred of Eru Lee he’s not lost to rage and despair. So, I’m still here, I still have faith in this world, but I don’t spare myself illusions either. Ours is the most difficult of god’s tasks.”

 

“Am I a god to you then?” Lee asked, almost idly, as she observed her clone with narrowed green eyes that held all the fleeting and brilliant shades of green that a god’s eyes should hold.

 

“What else would you be, Eru-sama?” the clone asked with a rather bemused expression, “Forgive me, but you did assign us life and purpose, and made us in your image, if that’s not divinity then I’m not quite sure what is.”

 

Lee seemed to think this over for a few moments, as did Minato, because there was a difference between being a god and being the kind of god the clones spoke of (an all-powerful but often entirely indifferent and fickle god who created them merely as tools for her own use).

 

Shinigami, that Minato believed, for all that he sometimes caught himself thinking over it in a panic (that Lee was a god and not human at all), but what the clones claimed…

 

“I’m sorry you find this distressing, Namikaze-san, I would have spared you, but I think you would have found that more distressing if we hadn’t gone over all of this. You don’t really find ignorance comforting, and I don’t think you’re the type of person who ever would, so really, this is better,” Emotional Support Lee observed, breaking Minato from his own thoughts.

 

“No, I, don’t worry about me…”

 

“It’s in my nature to, you might not be Orochimaru-sama, but that doesn’t mean I don’t worry. I’m always worried if I’m causing someone pain, even unintentionally. To be honest it’s a bit… draining,” the clone mused softly, a nostalgic and painfully sad expression appearing on her face.

 

“No, really, it’s okay, I’m fine,” Minato insisted, taking her hands in his and somehow almost forgetting for a moment that he wasn’t really talking to Lee but instead a shallow copy of her, “You really don’t have to worry about my feelings or opinions. They’re… irrelevant, right?”

 

She smiled at him, and it was just like a smile Lee might give, a strangely tender and kind thing for all of Lee’s sharp edges, “You’re very kind, Minato, but you don’t have to be so concerned. This is what I am, I’m Eru Lee and I like supporting Orochimaru through emotionally difficult times in his life!”

 

Yes, but what was that really?

 

He let go of her hands slowly, uncertainly, returned to his seat next to Lee, and waited for something to happen or the world to start making some sense again.

 

When did clones begin to become so complicated?

 

And it was in this silence that Lee finally asked her own question, without the slightest bit of hesitation or uncertainty, as if she’d known this about the clones the whole time, “That’s all well and good, Emotional Support Lee, but tell me, what would drive a clone to completely abandon their purpose? Not twist it in an attempt to fulfil it, but abandon it entirely?”

 

“Nothing,” the clone said, for the first time looking truly alarmed and shaken by the line of questioning, “It would be… sacrilege. Abandoning your purpose, your meaning, that’s… To have no divine purpose is to take on the humanity’s greatest gift and curse, and not something for us to touch. No one would do it, not even an Emotional Support Lee at the edge of despair.”

 

“Is that right?” Lee asked, entirely dubious, no doubt the image of the clone (the one that Minato hadn’t even caught a glimpse of), running through her head once again.

 

“Is that the debacle, has one of my missing predecessors gone off the rails entirely?” the clone asked, eyebrows raised and that disturbed expression still on her face.

 

“In a manner of speaking, honestly, I’m still trying to decide,” Lee admitted before standing, staring at the memorial stone, “There’s something I’m missing here, some emotionally supportive benefit to all of that nonsense that I must be overlooking…”

 

But Minato wasn’t so sure, because hearing this girl talk, just the way she talked and that calm resignation in her voice, he couldn’t help but wonder if all of them ended up a little mad in the end. With the kind of helpless despair that she was describing, that Minato had seen in person more than once, becoming a missing nin, even one who would attempt to kill someone like Haru, wasn’t out of the realm of possibilities.

 

If it was Minato in their stead… Well, he didn’t know what he’d do when pushed that far.

 

“Is this about the clone that the Uchiha have borrowed?”

 

And Minato’s train of thought abruptly cut off, he and Lee whipped their heads to turn at the clone.

 

“The what?” Lee demanded, but the clone wasn’t rattled at all, and just offered a strangely Lee-like casual shrug.

 

“The Uchiha borrowed my most recent predecessor, once she reached her last tethers of sanity, and offered her some pale imitation of emotionally supporting Orochimaru-sama.”

 

“To do what with her?”

 

The clone blinked, a puzzled look crossing her face as she took in Lee’s intense and demanding expression, “To befriend and watch their children, or at least, that’s what they told my predecessor before they took her. And me, when they made their offer.”

 

Free babysitting, but D-ranks were practically free to a clan with that much money, and the Uchiha had never had issues before Lee in providing child care. And why a clone of all people, Lee’s clones were efficient, no doubt, but they weren’t the type of people you wanted to watch and take care of your children…

 

Especially not a clone designed to emotionally support Orochimaru, who had already given up on their one purpose in life, and were only one emotional outburst away from brutally killing themselves in front of whoever happened to be watching.

 

Anyone would probably be better than Lee’s suicidal clones…

 

Lee’s face paled, all expression disappeared, and without a word she stood and stared back into the village towards the Uchiha compound, “Those bastards.”

 

“Lee?”

 

“They don’t want babysitters, Minato,” Lee said coldly, her hands twitching at her sides, as if barely restraining themselves from summoning kunai out of thin air, “They want the mangekyo sharingan.”

 

* * *

 

The Dursleys, strangely, had never wanted much to do with Lee or her abilities. Though the abilities in question had been unrefined at that point, untried and untested, they’d known that something was freaky about Eleanor Lily Potter, and to their credit they never tried to make use of it.

 

Granted, they probably would have beat it out of her if Lee had pushed the boundaries a little past their liking, and they certainly tried to starve and emotionally traumatize the chakra out of her (which unfortunately for them was not physically possible).

 

But they’d never tried to use her for her instinctive ninjutsu abilities either; so, in the end, Lee had to give some minimal amount of credit where credit was due.

 

And in Konoha, even though she was a ninja, using her abilities for the state, it hadn’t felt the same as being used. Sure, she was used, in a sense, but so was everyone else, and more she chose how she was used and… And Konoha, it was kinder than other villages in that sense, she wasn’t really a tool at the end of things, Konoha’s very existence was designed so that she wouldn’t have to be.

 

Not like if she had been born during the clan wars.

 

This then, walking silently to the Uchiha compound without a word, leaving the entirely too sympathetic Emotional Support Lee behind at the memorial stone, was the first time she felt well and truly used for her own exceptional abilities.

 

Not simply used, but used in the crudest manner she could imagine, like taking a finely crafted blade, whose possibilities were perhaps endless, and using it to chop up dead fish. The clones might only be clones, be strictly made to be just inhuman enough to be reassuring but human enough not to cause alarm, but they were more than their traumatic and horrifying deaths.

 

Lee’s own worth was more than their traumatic and horrifying deaths.

 

They were more than simple tools to induce horrific Uchiha magical eye blood limits, blood limits no one had dared induce on purpose according to Uchiha Mikoto, because of the sheer death toll involved in obtaining them. (Because if a single dojutsu needed at least one dead brother then you were talking about a fifty percent decrease in the Uchiha clan.)

 

Or at least, they hadn’t tried until now, when a supply of perfectly expendable human duplicates arrived for the picking on their front doorstep.

 

And if the shadows grew darker as Lee passed by, if her footsteps seemed to echo, and her skin seemed to pale an eerie white and her hair like the sun itself, if even Minato (quiet and silent beside her) seemed momentarily like nothing more than a shadow by her side, then who was she to notice?

 

Somehow the path revealed itself without her even thinking about it, each step confidently following the other as she made her way through the Uchiha district, ignoring the wide eyes of civilian and ninja alike as they either stepped out of her path or attempted to confront her (only to be thrown out of her way as she kept walking).

 

(Which, she’d no doubt hear about later, but right now they hardly seemed like human beings at all and instead cheap cutouts of people in the vein of the Dursleys.)

 

Soon enough they were inside one of the larger buildings, one filled with the laughter of small children. And, stepping inside, there she was, an almost perfect replica of Lee herself, smiling cheerfully down at a dozen dark haired and dark eyed Uchiha children, a crown of flowers placed on her head by one of the adoring toddlers.

 

And in that moment, Lee didn’t see the present, but the future, the certain future that would come with either success or bitter defeat, the walls painted in blood and her replicant’s eyes green and glazed and she lay their unmoving, perfectly indifferent to the screaming of the children surrounding her.

 

(And with smiles like those on their faces, surely it wouldn’t be long now, because Lee herself had always been a tad bit impatient and her clones weren’t all that different.)

 

“Don’t you think you’ve done enough?”

 

The clone looked up, startled, and stood and bowed to Lee and Minato, displacing a few of the younger kids around her, “Eru-sama, I’m sorry I didn’t see you… If you wouldn’t mind, you’re making the children uncomfortable.”

 

Lee stepped forward, the children (all under the age of five, all before even reaching the academy) parted like the red sea, allowing her to walk until she was face to face with her facsimile.

 

“Am I? That’s ironic, isn’t it, I would imagine that in a short amount of time you’ll be making them far more uncomfortable than I ever could.”

 

The clone blinked, stared at her, before offering her that cheap grin that clones were so known for, “I’m Eru Lee and I like supporting children through emotionally difficult times in their lives!”

 

Lee offered a far more cutting smile back, “For now, but you plan to abandon them at the nearest opportunity, as you planned to abandon Orochimaru at the nearest opportunity. It’s in your nature, I would know, it was very intentional after all.”

 

Lee motioned to the children then, catching their wide-eyed and alarmed expressions as they stared up at her in confusion and some in sharp fear (seeing someone that looked so very like their friend and watcher yet not at all), “But I won’t stand by and allow myself to become a tool for these people! I won’t let your cheap death buy them dojutsus by the bucket full for their next generation!”

 

The clone though, her face was perfectly blank, for once nothing even remotely human in it, and she did not even twitch as a toddler tugged on her sleeve with a quiet, “Nee-san?”

 

Finally, the clone asked, “Have you forsaken me then?”

 

Lee let out a harsh laugh and motioned to the room, to the kids, to the walls, and even to the Uchiha compound itself, “It’s not about you, it’s never been about you, it’s about them… About turning people into machines to feed blood limits, about trying to play god when they have no right to, and using your own nature against you, and against me, dammit! If you do this to these kids, if you play into their hands, they’ll never recover from it, and you know it.”

 

Yes, they all knew it, every clone knew it, Lee was sure of that. Somewhere deep down these emotional support clones recognized the paradox of their existence. That to reassure emotionally, to support, to form a bond with these people, they could not exit gracefully without causing even more damage than they’d left behind.

 

They knew it, intimately, and they didn’t care.

 

Minato cleared his throat, breaking Lee from her thoughts, and for a moment he hesitated under all their staring before he smiled, that purely Minato smile of his, and said, “Emotional Support Lee, I’ve… I’ve learned a lot about clones in these past few weeks since our last C-rank. More than I wanted to, if I’m being honest. But one thing I think I’ve learned is that happiness, real happiness, isn’t a temporary goal post. Friendship, emotional support, is a long and winding path that doesn’t end when people smile for a moment or two, or feel a little better about themselves. It’s hard, and it’s long, and maybe it even seems unrewarding... You’re here for them now, but if you’re not here for them later, then how emotionally supportive have you really been, throughout all the difficult times in their lives?”

 

The clone spared Minato a truly desperate look, shaking her head at him, refusing to look down at the little boy tugging on her sleeve, “I can’t promise that, Namikaze-san, I can’t promise their entire lives…”

 

And it was almost sad, how terrified she seemed by that prospect, of even having to commit to even another year. And it struck Lee, for a moment, that perhaps she’d had the wrong idea about this, or implanted the wrong idea…

 

Human life was a mess, and they didn’t want that, but perhaps they needed to have a certain understanding of a purpose that lasted longer than a painted fence or a weeded garden.

 

So, it was Lee who said, slowly, tasting each word on her tongue before letting it loose, “It’s like being Sisyphus. Your task is harder than everyone else’s, and probably seems impossible, and certainly longer. But your task isn’t just the end, it’s the fulfilling of it to, because by performing your role, even if results are slow or Orochimaru is being a bastard, you’re being who you’re supposed to be. You’re a clone who supports people, even if they don’t want it, even if they don’t like it, and just by trying you’ve done everything you’re supposed to do.”

 

The clone didn’t nod or shake her head, or say anything really, she just continued to stare back and then slowly but surely turned her attention back to the kids, picking the boy tugging on her sleeves up into her arms and then turning back to the rest of them as if Lee and Minato weren’t even there.

 

Which was about the moment where Lee realized she was standing inside of an Uchiha daycare after having almost literally bulldozed her way through the Uchiha compound. Which… Well…

 

“Uh, Minato, looks like it’s time for us to head home… How about we get ourselves some of that ramen the one clone mentioned earlier?”

 

Minato spared a final glance to the clone, something undefinable in his eyes, before turning back to Lee and looping his arm into hers and saying, “I think I’d like that, Lee.”   

 

 

Under the moonlit sky, the night before they left for Suna for the start of the chunin exams, Lee and Minato sat on top of Senju Hashirama’s carved head and looked out at the hundreds of bright lights decorating the village.

 

Between them was a pot of tea, still warm, and a pair of half-full cups. Also between them were several weeks’ worth of training, apprenticeship offers, brief thoughts of religion and the price of dojutsus, and the philosophical wanderings of clones.

 

But more than that were the years between them, seven years of closest friendship he’d ever had, and everything that was _MinatoandLee_.

 

“Lee, do you ever wonder where we might be after the chunin exams?”

 

Lee turned towards him, her eyes reflecting the bright moon and the stars even while clouds cast shadows over her pale skin, and somehow in the dimmer lighting it made her look so much older than just twelve almost thirteen, “What do you mean?”

 

He swirled his tea idly, watching the water’s circular motion as he moved the cup about, “When I make chunin, I’m going to become Jiraiya-sensei’s apprentice, and you’re going to work with Hatake Sakumo. Even Haru’s probably going to be off working somebody. We’re going to be busy studying and learning so many different things from one another. I keep thinking that we might drift apart after this. That this may be the last time we’ll be this close to each other.”

 

Lee scoffed at this, “We’ve always been interested in different things, Minato. That’s hardly news. Plus, we still share an apartment.”

 

“Not like this though, not with entirely different teachers, different missions, different interests and goals...”

 

She considered this for a moment, staring out over Konoha at night, then without a word she took his hand, covering his cup of tea with her own, and with a trickster’s smile but a perfectly serious voice said, “We’re tied together, Minato. And I promise, that we’ll remain tied together until the very end, and even past that. And nothing, not giant foxes of fire, seals, burning villages, senseis, missions, or even wars could ever change that.”

 

“Trust me.”


	19. Oh Lee, You Magnificent Bastard

_In which Lee unwittingly quotes a Star Wars film that has yet to be created as well as a variety of other films, Minato cheats through his wit and growing skill in fuinjutsu, Lee cheats with her god like powers, and Haru cheats by having Lee cheat for him, and in Konoha the English shinobi finally begins trying to put the pieces together._

 

* * *

 

“I don’t think I like sand, Minato,” Lee said casually to him, her voice perhaps unusually loud in the barren silence that was Wind Country’s desert, her green eyes squinting ahead into the horizon in which Sunagakure had yet to make any appearance.

 

And Minato, for the second time in his life, was headed to the gates of Suna along with the rest of team seven as well as several other genin teams sent to try their hand at making chunin.

 

And in his head Minato reflected over each of them, those he knew and those he didn’t, everyone from old friends like Inoichi, Shikaku, and Choza, pseudo rivals like Uzumaki and her side kick Uchiha Mikoto, vague academy acquaintances like Uchiha Fugaku and the Hyuga twins, as well as people he’d barely associated with like Inuzuka Tsume and several teams that were formed of genins much older than Minato who were trying for the second or third time in their career.

 

Of course, they’d staggered their arrival somewhat, so the only ones on the road with them right now were the Ino-Shika-Cho team, Uzumaki, and the rest of Minato’s team. The rest would be arriving either before or after them.

 

Still, it was the first time Minato had ever headed somewhere outside of the village with anyone that wasn’t from team seven, and even though there was no real reason for it he couldn’t help but feel a little claustrophobic with all these people around, even when most of them were good friends (with the exception of Uzumaki, he wasn’t entirely sure what she was, only that it wasn’t the rival she thought she was but maybe slightly more tolerable than some unwanted pest).

 

“What’s wrong with sand?” Minato asked at Lee’s non-sequitur, not that anyone had been saying anything before but it was a bit of an odd topic to start out on.

 

It’d actually been unnervingly silent before then, Uzumaki having chattered for the first hour or so, shouting “believing it”, and “I’m gonna make chunin then hokage, believe it”, and of course, “You’re going down, Minato, you pretty flake”, and only later running out of energy to make these loud and unnecessary declarations, the jonin-senseis not feeling particularly chatty, and everyone else just sparing team seven, or rather, Lee and Haru, speculative and wary glances every now and then.

 

(No one had asked how or why Haru had developed a ridiculous blood limit out of nowhere, or what this blood limit was even supposed to be given that he now worse sun glasses all the time and it had turned his hair white, but it was clear that everyone blamed Lee for it. Which, normally Minato wouldn’t blame them, but it was surprisingly not Lee’s fault this time.

 

Or at least, not in any way that was immediately evident.)

 

Haru, for his own part, seemed even more tired than he usually was on missions, probably because he was working with about a quarter of his chakra, and looked about two seconds from falling face forward into the sand and lying there to be eaten by scorpions.

 

Minato had been thinking about the chunin exams, the clones Lee had left behind, Haru’s mysterious new blood limit, and anything and everything in between.

 

And Lee, apparently, had been contemplating how much she hated sand…. It really was such a Lee thing to be concerned about at a time like this.

 

“It’s coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere,” Lee said, waving her hand, as if by merely motioning to it the sand would reveal how annoying it truly was.

 

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Minato said, considering this, and then stating, “Well, I don’t think I have anything against sand. It’s not that much worse than rain, if you think about it. Rain is cold, wet, irritating, and it also gets everywhere.”

 

“Fair,” Lee acknowledged before a look of irritation passed over her fair features and she continued, “But then, I’m going to have to pretend to be a normal person in these conditions. I can’t pretend to be a normal person under ideal conditions let alone when dealing with sand.”

 

“Oh,” Minato said, “So that’s what this is about.”

 

“It’s just… How can I pretend to be Dead Last leveled when I’m thinking about sand and how sandy it is?” Lee asked, pale hands flailing everywhere with no concern for Minato’s personal space as he walked beside her.

 

“I think the sand might be the least of your problems, Lee,” Minato commented back which only caused Lee to sink further into the depths of her rather passionate despair.

 

“I’m doomed, Minato, perfectly and utterly doomed,” Lee moved her hands through her hair, driving it away from her face to momentarily reveal the nidaime’s seal on her forehead, before letting red curls fall back with a great dejected flop.

 

“Oh, it’ll be alright.”

 

“Only if the definition of alright is doom.”

 

“Oh, that is just,” Haru started from behind them, finding the energy to talk for the first time since they’d started, and then finding the energy to walk faster so that he was keeping pace with the pair of them, “I’m ten times worse than you, Lee, and everyone knows it and if anyone here has the right to be doomed then it’s me!”

 

“Yes, but I have to reach your level of mediocrity, Sunglasses Magoo,” Lee said, “Which is a daunting task for even the most talentless of genin… You barely look like you can make it through this desert.”

 

Minato winced, hoping for Haru’s sake that Sunglasses Magoo wouldn’t stick, because somehow that was even worse than Dead Last.

 

Haru didn’t even seem to notice though as he adjusted his sunglasses and shot back, “Yeah, which clearly shows that if any of us are actually going to die during this thing, it’s me, because I’m actually going to die during this thing!”

 

“And yet somehow you keep surviving all our C-ranked mission turned cesspool of S-rank garbage,” Lee stated in that unimpressed and patently Lee tone of hers that could drive even the most patient and temperate of men into a fit of rage, “If you really were as incompetent as we all think you are, then surely, you’d be dead by now.”

 

“… No, you know what, I’m not going to take that as a complement!” Haru spat back, to which Lee’s eyebrows just raised in that dubious and still completely unimpressed manner.

 

“It wasn’t supposed to be a compliment, Dead Last,” Lee explained, “Just a casual observation on how unlikely it is, if you’re as terrible as everyone thinks you are, that you’re still among the living. Clearly, it’s a sign that I’ve been underestimating you, and that I’ll totally do worse on the exams.”

 

“Yeah, I’ll remember that when I’m face down in some ditch somewhere, Lee…”

 

Minato found himself moving backwards as Lee and Haru continued to bicker with each other, getting further and further into the absurd sort of conversation you could only have with Lee, until finally Minato was walking next to Shikaku, who was watching Lee and Haru go at it with a pair of dubiously raised eyebrows, occasionally sparing a glance to Inoichi and Choza who only looked back rather incredulously.

 

Finally, when Lee made some ridiculous comment about Occam’s razor and probability and how if one were to accept the universe as a rational place (as everyone besides Lee seemed so eager to do) then Haru’s survival was near impossible, and thus either Haru was the greatest evidence she’d ever seen for the world being a giant genjutsu, or Lee was going to fail the exams that much harder than Haru, Shikaku asked, “Are your missions always like this?”

 

Minato hesitated, took in Haru’s response to this, which was a bit of flabbergasted offense and irritation, and conceded, “Well, more or less… Although, usually those two don’t bother talking to each other… and there’s a lot more lethal threats.”

 

Well, that wasn’t quite it. Lee had never gone out of her way to avoid Haru, and had needlessly and unwittingly insulted him constantly, and Haru had held his own against these comments and railed against them every now and then, but there was something weirdly closer about this. Where before it would have been a comment here and there before both of their attentions wandered elsewhere, now they were having a (somewhat) legitimate conversation, neither losing interest.

 

Usually by this point, long before this point, Lee would have returned to Minato and would bring up something else, probably sand again and why it was now her greatest enemy (aside from plant zombies).

 

“So, do the constant stream of insults and ‘I’m worse than you are’ happen during the fights to the death or are they what cause the fights to the death?” Shikaku asked, and Minato had the small sense to feel slightly embarrassed by it, but managed to just shrug.

 

“Well, sort of around the fights to the death, if I think about it,” not that Minato could drop many details of any of his C-ranked turned A-rank missions, so he couldn’t exactly explain that when someone gave Lee a run for her money she got eerily silent.

 

“You’re on the same team, how can they not talk to each other?” Inoichi asked, “Even Lee can’t be that bad.”

 

“Well, I didn’t say they don’t talk, just that Lee usually calls him Dead Last, he says something about resenting it, and then it’s kind of over.” Minato said, “This…”

 

“Extended bickering?” Choza supplied between mouthfuls of chips, watching Lee and Dead Last go at it like he was watching television.

 

“Extended bickering,” Minato parroted, “Is new.”

 

Something had happened on that last mission, well, a lot of things had happened on that last mission, but something between Lee and Haru. Something had relaxed itself, or clicked together, so that they had some understanding of what the other really was. Or at least, enough of an understanding to not just dismiss the other entirely.

 

And it was… nagging at him.

 

He didn’t really know why it was bothering him, and he felt a little uncomfortable with the fact that it was, but still, something about the way they could so easily talk to each other and not pay any attention to anyone else, it just bothered him. Even when he had other, much larger things, to worry about, like clones, translations, the English ninja, or even the exams.

 

Before he could puzzle that thought down to its roots Uzumaki’s voice sounded loud and clear for the first time in hours, “Well, if you ask me, then Haru’s right, and Lee’s clearly going to destroy everyone, believe it!”

 

This, apparently, was enough to interrupt the bickering as Haru looked back, offering a rather thin and unamused smile, “Thank you, Uzumaki, you’re a real help.”

 

“Of course, I’m real help,” Kushina exclaimed, “Besides, Lee just bulldozed her way into the Uchiha compound and back out again, leaving jonin strewn on rooftops, just so that she could lecture some Uchiha babysitter or something. If that isn’t worth decimating the competition, and proving what a real kunoichi is capable of, then I don’t know what is.”

 

“That is…” Lee stopped, flushed, a rather alarmed and wide-eyed look appearing on her face, “Reports of my infiltrating any compounds are greatly exaggerated.”

 

“Oh, come off it Lee, Mikoto was there, she told me all about it,” Kushina said, waving her hand, “Besides, you’d have to be blind not to see the Uchiha police force flung everywhere.”

 

Lee clearly was wracking her brain, trying and failing to remember the dozen shinobi she’d flung out of her way on her warpath to confront her missing clone, and instead just lamely asked, “…There were people there?”

 

Minato could easily see where this would head without his interference, especially since the last thing Lee really needed was focus on her ridiculous talent and ability to fight off A-ranked jonin with dojutsus, “I was there too, and it really wasn’t as impressive as Mikoto made it sound, the Uchiha weren’t really going to take Lee seriously…”

 

“That’s not how I heard it, Mina-chan,” Uzumaki scoffed, “Of course, it’d be the perfect flakey action for a flake like you to undersell how much of a badass Lee is.”

 

“For god’s sake, I am not a flake,” Minato normally was above bickering with Kushina but she really was edging a line today, “And I’m not underselling Lee.”

 

“It’s alright, Minato, even though Lee is going to crush you too, and I’m going to be hokage, you’ll still be a really nice secretary to look at,” Kushina continued, looking so absurdly confident of herself and even more irritating for it.

 

“Now that’s just too far,” Lee stated, “Insult Dead Last all you like, but Minato and his undeniable future as hokage, that’s nearing blasphemy of the highest order.”

 

“Come on Lee,” Kushina said, “We serious kunoichi have to stick together, otherwise we’ll be overrun by the fangirls, and then where will our reputation be?”

 

“My reputation will be exactly where I left it,” Lee stated, “And Minato’s will be where he left his, no matter how many times you call him too pretty to function.”

 

Minato felt his face flushing, suddenly noticing how everyone’s eyes were turning towards him, even the jonin-senseis who had been mostly quiet or reservedly talking amongst themselves during all of this.

 

“But he is too pretty to function!” Kushina snapped back before waving a hand towards Minato, “Look at him! Look at his face, and his hair, and his eyes! He’s prettier than I am!”

 

“Prettiness does not dictate one’s ability to function or one’s ability to be a shinobi,” Lee stated, “Dead’s still dead after all, no one cares how pretty the person holding the kunai is. Right, Dead Last?”

 

“What?” Haru asked, “What do I have to do with any of this?”

 

“Well, as the person who has come closest to death out of all of us…” at the sight of everyone, namely all of those who had personally seen Lee die and resurrect herself, Lee added, “Recently, how did you feel about the prettiness of your enemy nin?”

 

For a moment Haru appeared to be at a complete loss for words, finally, he asked slowly and with extreme trepidation, “Lee… Are you asking me if I find you attractive?”

 

Lee blanched, wheeled to look at him with a completely stunned and somewhat disgusted expression, “No, why on earth would you think I was asking that?”

 

“Well… Because… The enemy nin… I… No, Lee, I did not think about how attractive she was. At all. Ever.” Haru then visibly shuddered, likely compartmentalizing this conversation and any thoughts he might have had about the rogue Emotional Support Lee as well as Lee herself.

 

“See, Dead Last agrees with me, when it comes down to it, it doesn’t matter if the shinobi in question is as pretty as Minato or as hideous as a plant zombie, he’s still going to crush his enemies, see them driven before him, and hear the lamentations of their women, you know, all the best things in life.”

 

“Those are the best things in life?” Inoichi balked.

 

“Are you doubting the wisdom of the barbarian they call Conan?” Lee asked, looking perhaps even more offended than she had when Kushina had been insulting Minato.

 

“Yes?”

 

“Well,” Lee said, apparently at a loss for words as much as Inoichi himself was, “That is certainly not best in life.”

 

“Hey kids,” Jiraiya suddenly cut in, “Not that I don’t enjoy the mindless chatter but if you don’t shut up soon then I doubt any of you are becoming chunin.”

 

And that was enough to remind everyone why they were really here, prompting Minato to let loose a sigh of relief as they descended into silence once again, and he was left to his own thoughts.

 

Honestly, Uzumaki was so embarrassing sometimes and for all that she tried to help Lee sometimes just made it that much worse.

 

The road continued, up above them there wasn’t a single cloud in the sky, and like Lee herself had said he could feel the sand everywhere, coarse, rough, and somewhat irritating. Nothing at all like the solid ground of Konoha.

 

However, there was something else in this sand, something deeper than Lee’s own simple condemnation of it, memory lingered in it. Minato’s family, after all, had come to Konoha from Wind Country in hopes of a better life. However, only Minato had survived by the end of it. His memories of the trip were hazy, vague recollections of his mother’s face and his father’s hands the disappeared with every passing year, but something reminded him of a past just out of reach, the scent of the wind maybe.

 

Had his family not travelled to Konoha then likely Minato would have found himself a Suna-nin.

 

And of course, then he never would have met Eru Lee.

 

The high cliffs of Sunagakure came into view, the sun behind it so that a great imposing shadow was cast over the dunes, and somehow it seemed more impressive and alien then it had even before, on that first mission here, as if then he hadn’t had time to truly contemplate it.

 

It really wasn’t anything like Konoha.

 

And this was only cemented in as they passed through the gate, Jiraiya and the other senseis producing a pass and introducing their teams, the guard shortly directing them towards the foreigner’s quarters, no doubt laced with spies and traps for any of them stupid enough to not guard their tongues.

 

And as they walked the war seemed to be everywhere here, in a way that it wasn’t in Konoha, it lingered in the meager supplies in the market place, in the hardened and hungry edge that every shinobi seemed to have inside of them, a look that most Konoha shinobi, even the most terrifying, seemed to lack.

 

And here they were, foreign ninja, drawing every eye in the place to the leaf inscribed on their headbands.

 

“Well, they’re certainly an intimidating bunch,” Lee remarked casually, her eyes on someone their age, probably a genin, glaring daggers at them, “I don’t even think Orochimaru has glared at me this much… Well, recently anyways.”

 

Minato blinked, taking in Lee’s relaxed posture, her wide green eyes and contemplative expression as she eyed her surroundings without an ounce of true concern, and he couldn’t help but think that even though she looked so terribly relaxed and out of place, she was probably the most dangerous one here.

 

Even when she probably looked the least lethal.

 

Which just led him to wonder if any of them really were what they looked like, or if there was always something underneath the underneath.

 

* * *

 

It was blunt, too blunt, but language and his lack of mastery forced him to be so, “Nidaime-sama, why am I here?”

 

In Konoha, The Village Hidden in the Leaves inside of the Land of Fire, the man who had once been Voldemort and Tom Marvolo Riddle before that, with the unfamiliar and rather insulting name of Ren thrust upon him, contemplated the view outside of the window, the great towering trees in the distance and what looked like an imitation of Mount Rushmore in America only with unfamiliar faces, as well as the greater world he had somehow found himself in.

 

This was done over a game called shogi, with the honorable second, Tobirama Senju, something which resembled chess to some degree but with enough changes to throw him off his proverbial and literal game. Just as everything here was enough to put him slightly and perhaps dangerously off balance.

 

The language was hard enough, close to a month in and he was only passable enough in conversation now to ask somewhat intelligible questions, still hopelessly embarrassing himself over poor word choice, a lack of understanding of culture, and all those advantages he’d so prided himself in England simply gone leaving only himself stripped bare of his silver tongue.

 

He’d never realized how necessary language, the mastery of language, was in manipulating those around him. Of course, he’d never considered how he’d fair in a world where English was only spoken fluently by two twelve-year-olds, one of them being a girl who had almost been prophesized to destroy him if only she’d had the decency to be the correct gender.

 

Everything seemed to burn at him these days.

 

Still, he thought as he watched the second (the nidaime-sama, he must remind himself as he schooled himself to think in their terms), how long had it been since he’d played any kind of chess?

 

He’d played in Hogwarts, more there than anywhere else, it’d been a way to impress the purebloods in Slytherin, most of them believing chess to be a game of wizards rather than simply a game of mankind itself. Later, on leaving Hogwarts, he hadn’t had the time or inclination to play, this had only become more extreme when he’d been a lord, towering over the English aristocracy and far too untouchable for a mere game of chess.

 

He hadn’t missed it then, he’d never had any particular love for the game, even if he did have some natural talent for it. All the same, there was something nauseatingly pleasant about this forced peace, the trapped hum of magic under his skin and his isolation inside of this oriental home, where all he had to do in the world was play a game of chess, without masks, without ulterior motive, without anything but the game itself.

 

That, he grudgingly admitted as he took in Senju’s move on the board and the precarious position it placed his own pieces in, or perhaps he’d never met a man quite like Tobirama Senju.

 

From what he’d gathered and what he’d been bluntly told, Konohagakure’s history was far more recent and pressing than that of England’s. Tobirama and Hashirama Senju were brothers from an age gone by (although how they were brothers with such different features wasn’t truly explained), an era referred to as the clan wars, despite the fact that they had seemingly only been engraved into legend a few decades before with the founding of the village (although what had existed before the village was never truly explained in detail).

 

In essence, they were the Godric Gryffindor and Rowena Ravenclaw of these people. Hashirama Senju the charismatic leader, Tobirama Senju the intellectual, and Mito Uzumaki, Hashirama’s wife (or perhaps his mother, the age difference was a bit alarming and he wasn’t quite sure if he was understanding this correctly), perhaps playing the role of Helga Hufflepuff with a stretch of the imagination.

 

Even Slytherin had a role in their tale, a powerful wizard (or whatever constituted as a wizard for these people, a shinobi) named Madara Uchiha (spoken of with regret by Hashirama and contempt and rage by Tobirama), who had played a role in Konoha’s founding but also at one point had made a near successful attempt to destroy it, and had died in battle against Hashirama, who as far as he could surmise had been one of Hashirama’s greatest friends.

 

Of course, this was about where the similarities began to end, because these shinobi, despite their use of magic, were hardly wizards, and the mere idea of a wizard, of someone being taught spells for any purpose other than war, would be utterly absurd and perhaps inconceivable. There were no charms here, the closest being Hashirama’s strange talent at carpentry through magic, everything was instead geared towards espionage, healing, wards, and the general art of war.

 

Nothing proved that more than the little girl, Kushina Uzumaki, who darted in and out of the compound and thus in and out of his life. She constantly trained, writing runes with a diligence rarely seen in any Hogwarts student, practicing illusions, martial arts, and setting a wide array of traps that would have had Dumbledore doing far more than lighting her wardrobe on fire as a warning.

 

Of course, the girl also was nothing more than a girl, having made it her life’s mission to utterly humiliate him (and oh, how he waited until he broke his way out of these damned runes tattooed into his skin and he could skin her alive), but none the less she was being trained to kill and there was no pretense of anything otherwise.

 

Still, his thoughts wandered back to the white-haired man seated across from him, and the move he’d played on the board. Perhaps it was a bit too soon to tell, and perhaps his own uneasiness with his circumstances (his bound magic, his status as a foreigner, how damn easily he’d been played by these people), but he wondered if he’d ever met anyone this close to giving him a run for his money.

 

Dumbledore had been different, older, from an entirely different generation, and in the end he truly did not think in the ways that he had thought, and, given time, he had no doubt that Voldemort would have toppeled him like all the rest.

 

Among his peers there had been no one close to being his intellectual equal, the closest being Minerva McGonagall and only in Transfiguration, and afterwards there were even fewer who could have hoped to match him. It wasn’t a statement of arrogance, merely of fact, that in some ways Tom Marvolo Riddle had always towered above his fellow man.

 

Yet here was this man, this Tobirama Senju, who could beat him at chess while barely blinking an eye, seal his magic and trap him inside of his home, who could build an equivalent to Hogwarts from little more than his idealistic brother’s vision, and whose very glance belied an overwhelming intelligence and ability to assemble and disassemble everything around him with little more than an idle thought.

 

“I do believe this is one of the first times that you’ve bothered to ask anyone, or show any true curiosity for your circumstances, Ren-san,” Tobirama noted, finally breaking him from his thoughts as the man answered his first question.

 

The man’s red eyes bored into his, a strange dark almost mulberry color, yet still piercing almost despite their strange color, “Tell me, Ren-san, why do you think you’re here?”

 

He felt a smile, a small derisive thing, tug at the corner of his lips, both at the frustrating nature of the question itself and his own lack of ability to express himself truly eloquently, “That is hardly nice, nidaime-sama, I hardly know why I’m here, after all.”

 

“Humor me.”

 

Humor him, when had Lord Voldemort ever been commanded to humor any man? For that matter, when had Tom Riddle? (But those thrice damned runes thrummed warningly against his skin, unfamiliar and strong against him, and all he could do was sit there and smile like an idiot.)

 

Well, bluntness then, it seemed he was condemned to be blunt and curiously honest, “I have no idea why I’m here, only what Potter Eleanor has said, and she doesn’t know much.”

 

No, not with the short time she must have spent in England, and the strange bias she held against it, one which led him to think she must have somehow (inconceivably) been raised by muggles or else kept woefully ignorant.

 

They’d learn nothing real of England from her.

 

His smile grew tighter, yet somehow more charming, resembling those smiles he used to give Slughorn all those years ago, “I’m here, nidaime-sama, because you have no idea what to do with me.”

 

“Ah,” the white-haired man remarked, “While perhaps you are in the right vein of thought you are missing something glaringly important.”

 

An almost amused smile grew on his lips then, his fingers pushing a piece onto the board, playing his next move, “Oh?”

 

For a moment Senju said nothing, merely surveyed the board, and then, with barely a thought, placed down his next piece and stated quite bluntly, “You see, Ren-san, I know exactly what you are, the entire village knows exactly what you are. There is a term for your kind, ronin, a samurai without a master, or in the terms of the village, a nuke-nin, a ninja without a village. Your sole concern is your own power and longevity, and whatever morals you seem to possess are a matter of convenience and little more.”

 

The move was good, very good, soon the game would be over with Tobirama Senju, the honorable second shadow of fire, once again the victor.

 

Still, Senju continued, “Likely your more than sufficient in ninjutsu, fuinjutsu by your own admission, and perhaps even kinjutsu but your true mastery, your true talents, lie in infiltration and perhaps even seduction. More than your chakra, of which there must have once been a truly terrifying amount, you rely on your wits and your ability to turn those around you into informants and puppets for your own cause. Of course, with your chakra sealed, and without mastery over our language or us over yours, you find yourself at a disadvantage you’ve never had before. And you must loathe it.”

 

It was almost like Dumbledore, that first meeting where the man had lit his wardrobe on fire, where he had cut through Tom Riddle and seen him exactly for what he was only… Only it was not, three was no condemnation in this man’s eyes, distaste certainly, but not the same horrified condemnation that had permeated Albus Dumbledore’s entire being.

 

And for a moment he could only sit there in stupefied silence, until, of course, he started laughing, laughing even as he tried to form the words he needed in this unfamiliar tongue, “How in the world did you manage to reach that conclusion?”

 

But Senju offered nothing of worth, as usual, but instead the vague and dissatisfied remark of, “Such shinobi are not as uncommon as one would hope.”

 

Before he could comment on Senju’s words the man continued, “Regardless, we’ve reached something of an impasse, and I’ll be frank, I don’t have the patience or skill to try to flip you.”

 

“Flip?”

 

The man blinked then clarified, speaking slower and offering vaguely helpful gestures, “Turn you, change your mind… For that matter, I don’t believe you will ever be capable of concerning yourself with anything other than your own interests, but at the very least, I hope that we can be somewhat honest with one another.”

 

“That is not…” he gestured, searching for the right word under the nidaime’s sardonic gaze, and failing to find it.

 

“Ambitious?” Senju finally guessed, “Perhaps, but I’ll leave that sort of work for my older brother.”

 

Of course, the older brother… Honestly, he had no idea what to make of Hashirama Senju, there was certainly a level of deference offered to him as head of the clan and first shadow of fire that even his brother lacked, but all the same the man was such… Such an idiot. Really, it was impossible to take a man who cried at soap operas seriously.

 

Well, cutting to the chase was all he was capable of these days, and besides, how long had it been since he’d played the game so bluntly with anyone, namely with anyone who so clearly saw him for what he was, “How on earth did this… _backwater_ place I’ve never heard of, manage to get their hands on Potter Eleanor?”

 

“Potta?” Senju asked, and with that he remembered that the girl had changed her name, now went by some bastardized version of Ellie.

 

“Lee,” he clarified, “El Lee, I think.”

 

“Eru Lee, you mean. Potta is a clan from _England_ , Eru’s original clan?”

 

Ah, there it was, the hook.

 

“Not just any clan,” he scoffed, fighting the smile that threatened to grow on his lips at Senju’s blatant show of interest, “One of the sacred twenty-eight, and more powerful than most…. She’s clan heir, you know, and with her parents dead would inherit the clan head title in a few years if she was still in _England_.”

 

“It’s a…” he floundered, motioning for the word needed but Senju failed to supply it, his eyes still burning as he took in Eleanor’s status of heir to the house of Potter, “… sad thing that she wasn’t there long. She didn’t learn much, but I did.”

 

He could almost feel his eyes burning, the confidence of this moment somehow belying his own awkwardness with this language, “I know _England_ , I know centuries of its history, I know its clans, I know its politics, I know its jutsus. If you tell me about Konoha, about Lee’s role inside of this place, about mine, then I’ll gladly share everything I know.”

 

For a moment Tobirama Senju considered it, again seemed to dissect Lenin from the outside in, and there was absolutely nothing subtle about it or the conversation for that matter, and yet for all his bluntness and impatience there was still something so very cutting about him. Finally, after a too long silence, the nidaime hokage nodded his agreement.

 

“But not today,” Senju cut in before he could say anything, “We will wait until I learn _English_ and you become more proficient in our tongue.”

 

“Yes,” he said in response, because only then could they play on the same level, only then could they truly play any game of either chess or shogi, and then (the ink on his neck buzzing as always), then he would have a lot of fun destroying Tobirama Senju.

 

* * *

 

“Now, I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country,” Lee started, arms slung around Minato and Haru’s shoulders as they huddled together one final time before the first part of the chunin exam began, “He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”

 

Minato couldn’t help but smile, even as Haru slowly turned to look at her, white eyebrow twitching, “Lee, that was the least inspiring thing I’ve ever heard.”

 

“Patton is the most inspiring thing you’ve ever heard,” Lee said, “In the words of Uzumaki, believe it.”

 

“Why don’t you try a different one, Lee?” Minato asked before Haru could interject about how this still didn’t make him feel any more inspired and confident than before.

 

“Fine, alright,” Lee said with impatience before taking a deep breath and quoting, “Men, all this stuff you’ve heard about _America_ not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the war, is a lot of horse dung. _Americans_ traditionally love to fight. All real _Americans_ love the sting of battle. When you were kids, you all admired the champion _marble shooter_ , the fastest runner, _big league ball players_ , the toughest _boxers_. _Americans_ love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. _Americans_ play to win all the time. I wouldn’t give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That’s why _Americans_ have never lost, and will never lose a war… because the very thought of losing is hateful to _Americans_.”

 

Of course, the only thing Haru had to say to this was, “… The hell is _America_?!”

 

“Dead Last,” Lee said, “You are entirely missing the point and killing the mood and I am giving you one last chance with one more glorious quote from the 1970 Patton film.”

 

“Well I don’t think I want another…”

 

Lee cut him off, “For over a thousand years, Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honor of a triumph – a tumultuous parade. In the procession came trumpeters and musicians and strange animals from the conquered territories, together with carts laden with treasure and captured armaments. The conqueror rode in a triumphal chariot, the dazed prisoners walking in chains before him. Sometimes his children, robed in white, stood with him in the chariot, or rode the trace horses. A slave stood behind the conqueror, holding a golden crown, and whispering in his ear a warning: that all glory is fleeting.”

 

Minato blinked, blinked again, and slowly said, “Now think I’ve been uninspired.”

 

“Well then, you should have taken the first quote,” Lee said.

 

“Right, something about bastards dying for countries?” Minato asked, a smile tugging at his lips.

 

“Specifically making that other bastard die for his,” Lee corrected with her own rather blood thirsty grin while Haru just blanched and looked like he wished he could be anywhere else in the world right about now.

 

Team seven, they’d come so far and yet more and more Minato couldn’t help but see them as they were, all those months ago when Jiraiya met them on a rooftop. Only now they could replace a rooftop with a dark room filled with tables, each with four seats, shaped like semi circles with a portion cut out where someone could stand.

 

A door opened, Suna-nin began to walk in, and Minato offered his teammates one final parting smile before breaking from the huddle, “Right, well, I guess I’ll see you both on the other side.”

 

Soon enough the door slammed shut and an older gray-haired woman walked to the front, sharp dark eyes lingering on them all and a sense of confidence to her, after surveying them all and watching each of them squirm for a good number of minutes (even the Suna genin seemed to quake in terror and awe of her), and finally she said, “The first test of the chunin exams here in Suna shall test your acumen as a team. Here you will play a game of black jack, with a Suna jonin as your dealer. Each member of your team shall be assigned to a different table and you will all play through various rounds, gaining winnings from bets you place based on your ability to get your cards closest to twenty-one, losing the bet immediately if your cards total a higher number. Each player’s winnings will be combined with the rest of their team’s, and only those teams with the top percentage of winnings can advance to the next round. However, if one of you genins is caught cheating by the dealer, you will immediately be asked to cash in and be removed from the game with whatever winnings you happen to have at that moment. The game will last an hour.”

 

Minato then was quickly ushered to his own table, away from Lee and Haru, and taking his seat, he found himself at a table with seemingly unremarkable opponents. The Suna genin dark-eyed and hair an orange that was almost red but while he glared it lacked intimidation or any real confidence, the Kiri nin a quiet, dull eyed sort, who again lacked any real intimidation, and an older Konoha-nin from one of those genin teams who was probably trying for the second or third time.

 

From the jonin there was nothing as he quickly passed out the cards, and as he did so Minato considered how to best go about this. The trick was either to manipulate the deck in your favor or else to know what was coming next. If he had any real talent with genjutsu he’d probably rely on that, just displaying the cards that he needed to hit twenty-one, or prompt those around him to play bad hands, but genjutsu was one of his weaker points…

 

In fact, Minato’s best bet was probably cheating the old-fashioned way, making the assumption that there were fifty-two cards in the deck and counting them as they passed, making it easier for him to guess what they were.

 

Concentrating quickly, recalling what he’d been taught in the past few weeks by Jiraiya, Minato placed small, unnoticeable, marks of fuinjutsu on cards throughout the deck so that he could better track them as they were played.

 

And as it went along this strategy, while not fool-proof, brought him into the lead, even more so when Minato managed to add reflective seals, visible to him, behind the dealer and the other player’s heads.

 

(Of course, Minato’s success prompting the others to get nervous and begin to eliminate themselves one by one as they too blatantly showed their hands at cheating. The Kiri nin somehow managing to get himself out before half an hour had even passed.)

 

So, he had a comfortable lead among the other players, and probably enough winnings to easily donate his share to the team, of course, this depending on how Lee and Haru were doing…

 

And as if to answer this internal question, as the hour came to a close, there was a loud outburst from behind him, one that he really should have been expecting from the beginning. Because you couldn’t invite Lee to anything without expecting her to go flipping somebody’s metaphorical table.

 

* * *

 

Lee was placed at a table with Lazy Nara and two other genin from the other villages that she couldn’t find herself to care about at all, mostly because she was still trying to figure out how she could do anything while trying to act like someone with a normal amount of talent.

 

After all, if Lee was allowed her full arsenal, this would be ridiculously simple, beyond simple, really. She’d probably be already done with the task, have infinite money, and be walking out the door with Minato on one side of her and Dead Last on the other.

 

Now she was stuck with… She didn’t even know what, genjutsu, according to Jiraiya.

 

Which, not that genjutsu wasn’t useful, but really, her other jutsus tended to be so much more impressive.

 

Lee spared a look across the room to where Minato was sitting, of course, he looked like he was in the zone, pale blue eyes burning into the deck as he thought about how to approach this problem, likely already having come up with some sort of solution to rigging the game in his favor without getting caught.

 

And now Lee was going to be dead weight along with Dead Last, and no one, not even Minato, could be expected to pick up that slack.

 

Of course, that was when, glancing back to her table, she noticed that Lazy Nara was giving her a very un-lazy glare. In fact, one might say it was a death glare, given the small amount of killing intent that was leaking off him. You’d think Lee had killed his puppy and then kicked its corpse for good measure.

 

Which, she hadn’t, or at least, couldn’t remember doing anything like that recently.

 

Lee was about to ask him what the deal was, especially since she’d remembered being on good terms with him on the way over and the time they’d talked before that, but then it struck her that he was probably expecting her to screw him over with her god like powers on the path to victory.

 

Which, if Lee had her full arsenal at her disposal then yes, she totally would.

 

Except she didn’t, and all she had left to her was the academy three and genjutsu and…

 

“Oh,” Lee said out loud as she looked down at the cards passed to her, then over at the dealer and her competition, “Oh, Lee, you magnificent bastard.”

 

Genjutsu, well… The world was already a genjutsu, and reality, in some sense, was what you perceived, real or not. What was the difference between making a card look like another one and making it actually the card she needed. For all anyone else knew, it really was just an absurdly strong genjutsu that they just couldn’t break.

 

Lee felt a grin coming on, the road to victory in sight, and she cracked her knuckles in anticipation.

 

After that the game became absurdly simple, almost boring, as with every hand Lee hit exactly twenty-one, no matter which cards were in the deck or how many times the dealer shuffled it. And Lee’s pile of winnings began to overwhelm the table within only a few turns.

 

“You, Konoha kunoichi, you’re out,” the Suna jonin said, eyeing her with the rather familiar almost Orochimaru-esque expression as he surveyed her pile of winnings as she hit twenty-one yet again.

 

“Out?” Lee asked as she forked over her latest winnings, “How am I out?”

 

“You’re obviously cheating,” the man said, motioning to her pile, “You just got your fifth one when there are only five ones in the deck.”

 

“Right, can you prove it?” Lee asked.

 

“I don’t have to prove it when you’re being this obvious,” the man said.

 

“Well, for all we know there are an untold number of ones in the deck, especially since you can’t even figure out how I’m hypothetically cheating.” Lee stated, with a shrug, before grinning at the man and demanding, “Now, good sir, hit me.”

 

And thus, Lee continued to gloriously slaughter, and it was truly glorious.

 

 Unfortunately, Lazy Nara did not seem to be slaughtering nearly as gloriously, his winnings were rather meager compared to hers, probably because he spent most of the time glaring at her than trying to win the game. At one point, she swore she felt something cold in her shadow as he tried to paralyze her right before she was about to demand another card.

 

In fact, he seemed to be trying to convey something silently with his eyebrows, something important… Probably about friendship, and maybe how Lee’s tactics were great for her, but didn’t do much to help him, and maybe hindered him since he wasn’t actively manipulating cards in the deck to suit his own needs, and was instead trying to predict the cards, which Lee was changing just to suit the cards in her hands.

 

Yes, right now Lazy Nara’s eyebrows were saying, “Lee, we’re sort of kind of friends and longtime acquaintances, and if you screw me over Minato will be very put out with you and you will have to listen to lectures about friendship, and teamwork, and the will of fire.”

 

God forbid she have a lecture on the will of fire.

 

Except, how to do it, she wasn’t about to stop getting her own winnings, and she couldn’t just hand him the cards he needed either…

 

But then genjutsu was such a versatile, beautiful, thing. All she had to do was convince everyone else that Lazy Nara was winning.

 

Thus, with the next round, the dealer calmly pushed a pile of chips towards Lazy Nara, despite him having a lower hand than the dealer. And this kept happening, and thus Lee continued to gloriously slaughter and Lazy Nara, (now sticking his head in his hand and giving up all pretense of playing, just sat there looking like a moderately rich idiot).

 

And the other two were losing now without any hope at all of winning.

 

And it was beautiful.

 

“You know, Lazy Nara, I think I’m starting to like the idea of this chunin exam thing,” Lee said to Lazy Nara, who still had his face in one hand.

 

“Lee, can you not, I need to concentrate.”

 

“Concentrate, why? You’re not doing half bad,” Lee commented only to earn a scoff from Lazy Nara, “Besides, Inoichi appears to be kicking ass over there, I mean, not on my beautiful level, but not badly either, probably giving Minato a run for his money by the look of it. And the chips guy appears to be holding his own fairly well.”

 

“Well, we can’t all slaughter at Eru Lee’s level,” Lazy Nara said, finally lifting his head only to have another pile of chips pushed towards him.

 

“Hey, you slaughter me in shogi all the time, why can’t I be absurdly good at gambling?” Lee asked before pausing, glancing at the dealer again whose eye was now twitching at her, and tapping on her cards, “Hit me.”

 

“Somehow, Lee, I have a feeling that it’s not the gambling that’s the real issue here.”

 

“Of course it’s not the issue, because I’m winning, and I’m doing it by being a completely normal person… Without cheating,” she added for the dealer’s benefit, which only served to make his eyebrow twitch slightly more.

 

“Will you shut up?!” the Suna genin asked, slamming his hand and cards on the table.

 

Lee blinked, blinked again, took in him and his meager pile of winnings, and asked, “Who are you and why are you talking to me?”

 

Before he could respond she returned her attention to Lazy Nara, “I think you should be more pleased, you know, since you’re in second place at our table.”

 

“…Thanks Lee, I’m really happy that I’m in second place at our table, without even playing a hand for five rounds.”

 

“Hey, that just means you’re better at this than I am… I, after all, have still been playing this whole time.”

 

Lazy Nara just spared her a look, a look that doubted everything she ever said, and wondered if she wasn’t joking because no one could seriously say such a thing. This of course, was perhaps emphasized by the pile of chips Lee earned as she hit twenty-one for what had to be the twenty-first time.

 

Instead of commenting on this she just looked at her victorious overflowing pile then back to Lazy Nara, “Do you think the second and third parts of the exam will be this easy?”

 

“That is it!” The Suna jonin’s hand came crashing down and he glared down at her with all the fiery rage of Orochimaru when Lee insisted he pay off her ramen tab, “I don’t know how you’re casting a genjutsu this strong, I don’t know how you’re cheating, but even if I can’t prove it you will get the hell out of my table now!”

 

“Alright, fine, fine, I’m going…” Lee said, gathering her piles of money into one of Minato’s handy storage seals, “No need to be so rude about it.”

 

“Well, Lazy Nara, best of luck in the rest of the game.” Lee said, to which he scoffed, shaking his head, and looking more than a little relieved and annoyed that she was leaving.

 

So Lee found herself cashing in, one of the few to have been kicked out of the game so early (but the only one absurdly successful) and lingering on the sidelines, the rest viewing their teammates with increasing desperation while Lee just observed hers with vague curiosity.

 

Minato was doing well, as predicted, not as well as Lee or Lazy Nara, but still holding his own and dominating his own little table. And Dead Last, as also predicted, looked about two seconds away from passing out and was clearly panicking, with no winnings whatsoever.

 

Well… Given Lee’s winnings and Minato’s they could no doubt carry Dead Last’s dead weight into the next round, but that wasn’t really in the spirit of teamwork.

 

Besides, with a sigh, Lee decided that all was fair in love, war, and teamwork, and at the end of things she really had no choice but to cheat on Dead Last’s behalf and carry his ass through the first part of this exam.

 

* * *

 

It really didn’t surprise him that he was losing.

 

There was the small fact that he could barely see, his eyes still going inconveniently in and out of focus behind his sunglasses, so that the numbers on the cards all seemed like wavy little squiggles, but the fact was that Haru’s table was actually good at this and probably manipulating the deck for their own interest.

 

It would explain why they kept getting really good cards while Haru kept getting the last card he’d ever need.

 

And despite having magical eyes that were apparently even more magical than the Hyuga eyes (which they were of course using at some other table to see through everyone’s cards), or the Uchiha eyes (doing whatever the hell the sharingan did), all they did was turn purple and make him tired.

 

If he had any ability to see through objects, cast awesome genjutsus, or just not be terrible then it had yet to show itself.

 

So, by about the fourth time through this Haru decided to come to terms with himself. He was going to lose, by a lot, and it’d be up to Minato and Lee to carry his portion of the team. Maybe just Minato if Lee was still panicking about what she was and wasn’t allowed to do.

 

Still, maybe, he thought to himself as he busted yet again, this was a good thing. They’d be kicked out of the non-lethal first round, he wouldn’t lose any limbs, they’d have another year and they’d be able to try again. Sure, Minato and Lee might never forgive him for getting them out this early, but they’d all still be alive and intact, and maybe next year things would be more reasonable.

 

Maybe he wouldn’t be so sleep deprived, maybe his purple eyes would actually do something useful instead of constantly drain him of chakra.  

 

The more he thought about it, as he looked at his cards and the amount he was now in debt (actually detracting from Lee and Minato’s winnings), the more he liked the idea. It’d give him time to do things, hell, maybe he’d finally walk up that tree without the chunin exams hanging like a blade over his neck.

 

And Lee and Minato would get over it, fourteen wasn’t an unreasonable age to be a chunin, they’d live.

 

Of course, this was when, idly tapping his card, for the first time in the game, he didn’t go over twenty-one.

 

And then the next time he didn’t go over twenty-one.

 

And it seemed like every card he hit he got the exact number needed to catapult him to twenty-one and with it every eye at the table turned towards him in frank suspicion at his miraculous hands.

 

“I uh… I guess my luck finally cashed in,” Haru stated lamely, adjusting his sunglasses rather nervously, which none of them seemed remotely willing to accept or in any way pleased by.

 

Across the room he caught a flash of red, and looking there, his eyes widened as he caught sight of Lee, eyeing his own table in idle curiosity, or more importantly, eyeing the deck and all of the cards.

 

“Goddammit Lee!” he screamed as he found himself winning yet another hand, and he opened his mouth to continue only to bite his tongue when he remembered that this was probably one of those things that Lee wasn’t supposed to be able to do, that she really shouldn’t be doing in other villages, and more she was cheating on his behalf as without her he’d be so far into debt it wouldn’t even be funny.

 

And so, he just had to sit there, face getting redder and redder, as the cards just kept on coming, practically dying of embarrassment. This was it, he was going to be in the second round of the chunin exams, the decidedly more violent round no doubt, there would be no easy way out for Haru. No, he was going to face violence and terror and other genin who were much more capable than he was.

 

And there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

 

(Naturally, when the game was finally over, Konoha’s team seven won by an embarrassing land slide, the next test was revealed to be some sort of death labyrinth, and all Lee could think to say as she caught sight of him was an overly cheerful, “You’re welcome, Dead Last,”, he almost couldn’t stop himself from punching her in the face.)

 

* * *

 

If Orochimaru or Tsunade were here, Jiraiya mused to himself, then he probably could have convinced them into joining an Eru Lee drinking game.

Every time Lee does something too Lee in an exam, and every time someone reacts just like you’d expect them to, you had to take a drink…

 

The trouble was, Jiraiya thought to himself after the first exam, then they’d all be plastered before the first hour was even up.

 

Still, he raised a shot of sake towards Maito Dai, catching the man’s confused if full grin, “Well, here’s to Lee missing the entire point of the first portion of the exam and yet still embarrassing everyone around her.”


	20. I am not Left Handed

_In which Konoha is clearly overcompensating with their tiny jonin plants otherwise known as team seven, Lee tries and fails to be a normal genin and then grows quickly frustrated at the underpowered nature of her subpar pretense, and the English shinobi does not understand Senju Hashirama._

 

* * *

 

Well, Haru thought to himself as he stood at the entrance of Suna’s constructed labyrinth, it looked just as imposing as he’d imagined the day before. Well, not quite as imposing as the endless swath of desert on all sides of the labyrinth, except of course the direction of the village itself a few miles behind them, but none the less the walls, sculpted from hardened sand and buried granite, were quite tall and practically humming with chakra.

 

It also didn’t help that Lee kept referring to it as a ‘death labyrinth’.

 

“So, let me get this straight,” Lee was saying again as she eyed the entrance, “In about ten minutes, we’re going to enter there, the wall’s going to close behind us, then, with this practically useless map they’ve given us, we have three days to navigate through all sorts of nasty shenanigans to make it to the exit which is… somewhere.”

 

Lee frowned and looked down at the scroll that had been handed to them before they’d been escorted to their starting point, in a different location from the starting point of every other team, meaning that it was just Haru, Minato, and Lee standing in the middle of a desert facing certain doom as usual.

 

Not that Haru was being pessimistic, or anything.

 

Lee however, as she read from the scroll, didn’t seem to be thinking about the upcoming doom at all, “Sandpit’, that is… That is unbelievably helpful. What else have we got here, oh, here’s one, ‘puppets’. I guess we have to look out for puppets in this one dead end… I think I like this task less than the last one.”

 

It was a sad fact of life that Haru agreed with that, as it was he kept staring at the walls, already so damn exhausted even after a full night’s sleep, that trek through the desert still getting to him. God forbid they get into an actual fight, Haru might actually die this time, even without facing Lee’s rogue emotionally supportive clone.

 

“They’re making it so that we have reason to seek each other out, without the other pieces of the map, the maze will probably be too large to solve with traditional methods and that’s not even getting into all of the hidden traps,” Minato said before concluding with a sigh, staring forward into the maze with a rather assessing glance, “We’re going to need more pieces of map.”

 

Lee however paid this little mind as she continued to inspect their own scroll.

 

“Oh, here’s actually an interesting one, ‘logic doors’, I bet you it’s one of those doors where one guardsmen always tells the truth and the other always lies,” Lee said, nodding to herself as she rolled the scroll back up and tucked it into one of Minato’s storage seals before tucking that scroll into her shirt (which, actually, was a bit underplayed for her since usually Lee seemed to store all of her things in some sort of extradimensional portal), “That’d be good, I actually know the answer to that one.”

 

“Well, Lee, good to know we have that one covered,” Haru spat out, before continuing to crane his head towards the walls, the passages looked narrow, and once they were inside he wouldn’t be able to see anything but the dull yellow slab of stone.

 

Oh, he was getting claustrophobic already.

 

“For your information, Dead Last, I think we’ll have a lot of this covered,” Lee stated, crossing her arms and giving him a rather annoyed look that she did not deserve to wear at all, “The last task was almost disturbingly easy. With Minato’s brains, my overwhelming abilities, and your… normalness, I think we’re ripe for success.”

 

Strange, the last time he’d heard that particular phrasing of their team dynamics they’d burnt down a hotel and Lee had gotten stabbed by plant zombies. If being on team seven had taught him anything, it was that you could take nothing, absolutely nothing for granted.

 

And, looking over at Minato and the expression on his face, he at least appeared to agree with Haru.

 

“The last task was made for genjutsu,” Minato responded with a rather sober yet determined look on his face, “And Jiraiya-sensei pretty much limited you to genjutsu, Lee, specifically so that you can’t use those overwhelming abilities. And Haru, no offense but…”

 

“I look like I’m going to die?” Haru asked, because god he felt like it.

 

“You’ve gone a bit… pale,” Lee noted, poking at Haru without the slightest bit of sympathy, “And you’re also swaying… Ever since you ate that giant magical peach you really have lost your normal edge.”

 

Well, when she put it like that, it made it sound like he was being assimilated into team seven’s… chronic Lee-ness. He’d probably have cared about that more a few months ago, now though, he was just tired.  Which probably was a sign that it was already far too late and he’d been, team sevened.

 

“I feel like I’m swaying,” Haru responded, trying to reign in his light headedness while there was still time, not to mention the desert coming in and out of focus like a mirage that never ended.

 

“We haven’t even started, Dead Last,” Lee pointed out, as if Haru was unaware of this fact, so he just offered her a slightly bland smile.

 

Minato however, appeared to be focused on the task ahead of them and turned from the entrance to address each of them.

 

“Well, with all that in mind, if the walls remain stationary, I vote we start by taking left turns, it’s slow but methodical and likely we’ll run into another team attempting the same strategy at some point. Hopefully sooner rather than later so we can accrue more pieces of the map,” then, looking out at the early morning sun, he added, “And hopefully, find some shelter by midday, so that we can travel at night.”

 

“That sounds very reasonable,” Haru said, Lee nodding as well, and it was, as one could always count on Lee to be… Lee, one could count on Minato to be rational, well, when he wasn’t too busy being hauled into one of Lee’s schemes.

 

It sounded like a very good and reasonable plan, if you weren’t Dead Last with chakra draining out of you by the second. With a forced sigh, willing himself to just come out and say it, Haru opened his mouth and admitted, “The trouble is, I still can’t see very well, so turning left is… hard, and honestly, I’m not sure how many hours I can walk in this… You may literally end up carrying me through the exam.”

 

“Are you serious?” Lee asked, her dismayed and surprised expression just rubbing salt in the gaping wound that was Haru’s pride.

 

“Unfortunately,” Haru responded, nodding slowly and shoving his hands in his pockets to avoid twitching uncomfortably under her glare. It was official, he had lost all his dignity along with his hair color and vision.

 

“Dead Last, I may have carried your ass last time with the plant zombies, but you are taller than me and Minato, and you have absolutely no excuse…”

 

“I’m just saying what it feels like, and it feels like I am desperately running out of chakra and that three days, in the desert, with limited sleep and food, while dehydrated, is not a good combination,” Haru interjected, before willing himself to calm down and just say it, “I’m just warning you, that’s all, I might be fine.”

 

“I don’t believe that, Minato, do you believe that?” Lee asked Minato, who offered her a somewhat hapless shrug, but before he could respond she turned back to Haru, “Dead Last, I’m not carrying you for three days in the desert.”

 

“Don’t say it like it’s entirely my problem! If one of us knew any medical jutsus this wouldn’t be nearly as much of an issue!” Haru pointed out before adding to this thought, “This is exactly the reason why someone on our team should have specialized in medicine! We have no medic nin, if one of us gets injured, we’re screwed!”

 

Minato and Lee sort of blinked at him, looked at each other, then back again. Minato stating in a sort of surprised tone, “That is… actually a rather large oversight in our team dynamics, Jiraiya-sensei really should have pointed that out.”

 

“No, no, he did,” Lee said before motioning to Haru in all of his pale, swaying, sunglasses glory, “Remember, he told Dead Last to do it, because he sucks at everything else… Clearly, Dead Last, this isn’t Minato’s problem or mine.”

 

“You both have far better chakra control than I do!” Haru stated, gesturing wildly, so much so that he had to readjust his sunglasses as they slid down his nose, “I can’t walk up a tree, if anyone should have learned something…”

 

“Haru, that’s hardly fair, it wasn’t as if Lee and I were trying to avoid…”

 

A great gong, unseen, rang out, the signal to step inside. They looked at each other, then looked back to the labyrinth itself. With breaths of anticipation, and not a medic nin among them, they stepped inside, and behind them, the wall, slowly, but surely, slid shut.

 

* * *

 

If Jiraiya was a man with stronger nerves then he’d be at the viewing platform right now, watching as the brats took their first toddling steps into the second task. Well, he’d watched those, actually, but after they’d started walking he’d decided that if he was going to take a break before Lee inevitably disregarded everything he’d ever told her and did something entirely too Lee, he’d better do it now.

 

This led Jiraiya to find himself in one of Suna’s few and far between quasi-civilian bars at an ungodly time in the morning. Not that there was much civilian about Suna, per se, but it was a bar that a foreign nin could walk into without being stabbed on sight, which was about as civilian as you could expect.

 

Suna was a hardened place, the burden of the desert made it impossible to afford anything else, and even the civilians, few as they were compared to Konoha, were all wiry and thin with stone in their eyes.

 

And an impressive sales tax on their sake, however, just this once, it was one Jiraiya was willing to pay.

 

The bar as it was, was empty, and deathly silent, only Jiraiya leaning against the counter and the bartender, rubbing at a glass with a cloth, looking seventy when he was probably only forty, and glaring straight at Jiraiya with death written in his eyes.

 

Yes, if Jiraiya was a slightly better person, he wouldn’t be here right now. But he wasn’t, instead he was sitting here getting a slight buzz, not even daring to get anywhere close to tipsy in a foreign village no matter how technically allied they were after the second war had ended.

 

No village, after all, was truly on another village’s side. This was especially true among the great five villages, who all had somewhat nasty reputations to cement their power (well, except, oddly enough, for Konoha, who were commonly referred to as bleeding heart treehuggers). Suna, in particular, made it their business to be terrifying.

 

What they lacked in numbers and resources they made up for in the quality of their jonin as well as their specializations in puppetry and poisons. There were probably some damn scary kids, maybe even a future kazekage, in that death labyrinth they’d constructed for the exams.

 

Of course, Konoha had some damn scary kids in the exams this time around as well, specifically, they had Jiraiya’s terrifying tadpoles.

 

And if those brats, and Kiri’s brats (which, Jiraiya wasn’t even going to get into the bloody mess that was Kirigakure), were pulling out the big kunai then Lee would start pulling out the big kunai and well, it’d all snowball from there.

 

“I better get my ass back,” Jiraiya said with a sigh, digging a few copper coins out of his pocket and slapping them on the table, offering the bartender a cheery grin even as the man’s glare intensified.

 

Oh, the hospitality of Suna, what a great thing it was.

 

Still not as bad for his heart and health as a weekend in the Bloody Mist.

 

He stepped off the stool with a sigh, moved towards the door, and immediately froze when the door opened and he found himself staring at none other than the honorable sister of the honorable siblings, bane of Senju Tsunade’s existence, expert medic nin and poison mistress, head of Suna’s puppet corps, and damn scary lady who Jiraiya had crossed paths way too often in Ame to be comfortable in her presence, Chiyo of Sunagakure.

 

Now, standing there, staring at her, Jiraiya figured he had a few options. One, he could bolt out the door like the hounds of hell were on his heels, and maybe be the cause of a diplomatic incident or at least a good deal of embarrassment for Konoha in this tender alliance. Two, he could casually slink out the door, offer a small bow of respect, and remind himself as cold sweat drenched down his back that the war was over, and a peace had been brokered between Suna and Konoha, and Chiyo wasn’t stupid and she wasn’t insane and she wasn’t about to do anything detrimental to a technical ally during the chunin exams of all things. Even if she did seem to have this unnatural dislike for Tsunade, which probably extended itself to Jiraiya and Oro as well, given that they were famed teammates and all. Three, he could calmly, sit back down, order another drink, and hope she went away.

 

Somehow, option one sounded the sanest, Jiraiya moved to start booking it out of the bar and back into the desert, but before he could even set a foot forward Chiyo, cackling like some mad woman about two decades older than she had any right to be, shouted at him, “I haven’t cleared a room that fast since the war!”

 

Then, eyeing him with dark, shrewd, and amused eyes she remarked, “It makes an old woman feel quite flattered to know that she makes the young Konoha shinobi quake so delicately in their wooden sandals.”

 

Jiraiya, stiffly, too stiffly, sat back down and offered her a rather strained grin and wave, “Oh, Chiyo-sama, I haven’t seen you since Ame. You’re looking well, it’s good to see you off the battle field for once.”

 

Surreal too, seeing Chiyo in the rain soaked country, or catching sight of her puppets, that had always been the signal that Oro, Jiraiya, and Tsunade were about to have a terrible day. Seeing her, not in civilian clothes, but in this oddly quasi-civilian setting… It seemed unnatural.

 

“If it weren’t for your damn slug princess you wouldn’t be here to see me after Ame,” then narrowing her eyes at him, “I’m sure I got you one of those times.”

 

“You did,” Jiraiya said with a small nod, “And it was… unpleasant.”

 

It had been, Tsuande had really saved his ass then, if anyone else had been on his team then, anyone slightly less capable, Jiraiya really wouldn’t have been here. Instead he’d be another rain soaked corpse, rotting away in Ame with all the rest of them.

 

The woman barked out a laugh, “Never the less, that’s all behind us now that we’re allies, at least, until the next one.”

 

Jiraiya’s smile turned rather sober, losing a little of its strained edge, and instead motioning for another drink from the bartender, and then raising his glass to her, he said, “Perhaps, we can hope that there won’t be a next one.”

 

Even as he drank the shot though, there was a dark, bitter, cynically amused thought that passed between them, as they both silently acknowledged what every shinobi in every country was acknowledging, that they already were in the shadow of the third shinobi war.

 

Though, perhaps, perhaps with resurrected hokages and Lee and who knew what else would spring up in the woodworks in the coming years, perhaps it would continue to silently hang overhead, a cloud on the edge of the horizon, for a good while yet.

 

That, at least, when Jiraiya didn’t overreach his own pragmatism and dream of world peace along with little Nagato of Ame, was what he hoped for.

 

Still, with a sigh, he looked Chiyo straight in her terrifying dark eyes, and decided to get straight to the point since she’d been kind enough to seek him out, “Look, I’ve got kids in the exams and I really should be headed back to watch them before things get too exciting, I only was here to take a small break while I still could. If you want to small talk with a Konoha-nin like myself, well, I’m afraid we’ll have to call in a rain check.”

 

This seemed to amuse the woman, “We don’t have those her in Suna, we don’t have much rain at all, but I see your point.”

 

She then too huffed a sigh, stared at him, and seemed to decide it was time to get to the point already, “I don’t make it a habit of watching the chunin exams, especially not these first initial weeding out portions, filled with overambitious genin who are better off painting houses. Brats come and brats go, and it’s only once every five years you see someone really worth watching.”

 

Oh no, Jiraiya had a very good idea where this was headed, as a spark of light appeared in her dark eyes and she leaned closer towards him, “But, the whole village is talking about that one Konoha team.”

“Are they?” Jiraiya asked slowly.

 

“Oh yes, you have the blonde, who seems smart enough, talented enough in fuinjutsu, though in the first round hardly that distinguishing amongst the flashy blood limits and budding genjutsu specialists. Then you’ve got the toe-head with the shades, who seems positively useless, and two seconds away from crawling into his own grave from chakra exhaustion. And then, then you’ve got the red-headed kunoichi, a genjutsu master, who all the upper level brats have been chattering about, placing bets on whether she’s Konoha’s idea of a jonin plant.”

 

Jiraiya, if he had been drinking right then, would have spewed sake all over the counter. As it was, probably looking like he was having a heart attack over the idea of Lee as a jonin plant in the exams, Chiyo continued, “The rumor mill says, that this gaggle of brats, are Jiraiya of the sannin’s problem.”

 

Oh, he was going to kill Lee. She had one job, only one job, play it cool and don’t show your hand, and she went and blew it in the first twenty minutes. Granted, at least it was genjutsu, or what they assumed was genjutsu, instead of whatever reality warping bullshit blood limits Lee actually possessed, but all the same, oh, he was going to kill her…

 

Slowly, rubbing at his temples, he nodded, “Yup, that would be my magnificent team seven, genin, by the way, not plants.”

 

This seemed to amuse the woman even more, “I didn’t say I thought they were plants, any of them, even your red-headed wonder child. All the same, what miracle trees are you feeding the kids in Konohagakure these days, and why the hell hasn’t anyone heard of an Eru clan?”

 

Well, Senju Tobirama had much the same question, he wondered if that would make Chiyo feel better or worse. Or, for that matter, how Suna was taking the resurrection of the hokages at all, Jiraiya had feelers out here and there, but with being a sensei hadn’t had any time to really look over any reports or visit in person himself. He imagined it made all the kages quite nervous…

 

Jiraiya shrugged and then offered the woman a sly grin, “I’m afraid what happens in Konoha stays in Konoha.”

 

Then, dismissing this, he added, “Besides, not every clan is as infamous as the Uchiha or Yamanaka, there are plenty of smaller clans that I doubt anyone outside of Konoha has even heard to or bothered to care about.”

 

How many, for example, still cared about Orochimaru’s small clan now that he was its only surviving member? Or, how many cared about the Hatakes, which had been whittled down to two? The idea that the Eru clan, the nonexistent Eru clan at that, was one of these small undistinguished clans that had died out in first shinobi war or even the second, it wasn’t too farfetched of an idea.

 

However, judging by the look on Chiyo’s face, she wasn’t willing to buy this bullshit, or the fact that he hadn’t really answered her question, simply stated a fact.

 

He offered her a polite smile, and waited, and waited as the silence grew longer and decidedly more awkward and terrible with every passing second. Just him, honorable Chiyo, and the bartender, still glaring.

 

Jiraiya caved, “So, some of your Suna brats don’t seem half bad…”

 

Chiyo didn’t even let him finish as she waved a hand, dismissing this, “My three-year-old grandson could kick the shit out of the lot of them.”

 

Well, she just came right out and said it, didn’t she?

 

“There’s only two in there worth watching,” Chiyo continued, counting the two genin off her fingers, “You have the undersized blonde, Yashamaru, and then that adolescent ginger Rasa, there’s a handful of others who are… decent, for an exam, but would have had kunai between their ribs in a hearbeat in Ame.”

 

And there had been, too many chunin from too many villages, promoted too soon, lining the streets of that war-torn country. And each of them, in their vests, beaming proudly, had seemed to forget that passing the exam for too many was one step closer to death.

 

Thank god for peace, momentary and hesitant as it was.

 

“Well,” Jiraiya said, “I’ve got to run and watch said brats, it has been… Interesting, running into you, Chiyo-sama.”

 

Then, before she could say anything else, he slapped down another coin, then, at a speed that was edging on being a little too fast for politeness, he booked it out of the bar, ignoring the sound of her cackles as he went.

 

* * *

 

Heading left, while probably their best option, was not a walk in the park either. Almost immediately they ran into collapsing walls, spikes rising from the sand, genjutsus, as well as puppets, and unlike in Konoha, Minato couldn’t count on Lee to just dismantle them without a second thought.

 

Since Minato, or someone at a genin level, couldn’t dismantle these things without a second thought, Lee held back, loitering just behind him and copying whatever idea he came up with to guard themselves from the puppets or avoid being impaled, meaning that it was Minato taking the lead for all but genjutsu, which was fine enough, for the first few hours, but he was already starting to feel the edge of exhaustion, and the sun was only growing steadily higher in the sky as noon approached.

 

If they were going to get any sleep at all today, they needed to do it soon.

 

Breathing heavily, looking behind him at the dismantled puppets, cut into ribbons by him and Lee with kunai and more chakra than Minato was comfortable sparing, he just shook his head, looked at her even with sweat pouring down his face and dripping into his eyebrows, “I can’t keep this up, Lee, you’re going to have to take the lead for whatever comes next until we find some shelter.”

 

Lee nodded, stepped in front of him, then even as she started walking asked, “Just so I’m clear, what exactly is in your repertoire, as a talented genin, just so I know what I’m clear to work with here.”

 

Minato sighed, started walking forward along with her, even as she probed out in front of them with her chakra, eyes locked on the corner they would soon be turning, behind them Haru was stumbling as he tried to keep up, tripping over the clay bodies of the puppets.

 

Probably focusing on keeping himself from collapsing as he had been for the past hour. Apparently, that warning he’d given hadn’t been unnecessary, as it stood, if they didn’t stop soon then they’d be dragging Haru along behind them.

 

“Oh, I don’t know, the academy three obviously, I’m awful at genjutsu, but you know that… Basic fuinjutsu, basic elemental jutsus, somewhat advanced ninjutsu…” he wiped the sweat from his brow, blinking and regaining his focus, “You’ve seen me fight plenty of times, fought against me, you know what I’m capable of.”

 

“Yes, well, I haven’t always paid attention… Elemental jutsus,” Lee said in turn, “I’d forgotten about those… Those require hand seals, right?”

 

“Everything requires hand seals,” Minato said before adding, “But, if you do it quickly enough, they might not notice that your seals aren’t matching with your jutsus.”

 

Well, anyone worth their salt would, but it was probably the best they could hope for from Lee, who apparently had memorized none of the hand seals over the years, and even the ones she did remember she had none of the instinctive muscle memory for.

 

“Still, that could be useful, there’s a lot of sand here, sand could be… useful, maybe,” Lee said, wiping her own sweat out of her eyes with pale hands, somehow unburnt even in the harsh sunlight.

 

“I thought you didn’t like sand,” Minato said, a smile creeping on his lips.

“Oh, I hate it, and this has not convinced me otherwise,” Lee stated with an authority that was not to be questioned in the slightest, “This is a very sandy labyrinth, Minato, in fact, that might be the worst thing about it.”  


“Not the puppets?”

 

“No, no, the sand is far worse than the puppets. It’s just so…” Lee trailed off, motioning with pale fingers, searching for that perfect word before settling on, “Sandy.”

 

“Sandy, that is… A perfect word, Lee,” Minato said with a slight laugh, oh if it was cooler out and he wasn’t expending chakra just to skim the edge of the sand, he’d have more appreciation for that.

 

“Thank you,” Lee responded, “I found it quite apt…”

 

She trailed off, stopping at the corner and peeking around then, silently, stepping out. There, on the other side, headed in the opposite direction and standing just past another area of dismantled traps, was a Suna genin team.

 

In the sunlight their headbands gleamed, silently, the three of them stared out at Minato and Lee, then Dead Last as he too rounded the corner then stopped at the sight of them. For a moment, there was perfect silence and perfect tension, and in the distance Minato could almost hear that music that Lee swore played in this type of situation, the Mexican Standoff.

 

Then, just like that, Minato and Lee moved forward and their three assailants with them. The smallest of them, blonde and violet eyed, likely a good four years younger than Minato and Lee, was ungodly fast, his chakra control ridiculous as blades floated around him, flying towards Lee and Minato and blocked only by Minato’s own blades as well as Lee’s improvised doton jutsus creating walls of sand.

 

The other two, their feet trapped in sand by Lee and then their heads knocked together by Minato, were eliminated almost immediately, making the fight instead two against one, but his chakra and his speed worked against Lee’s sand traps as he used his chakra to find purchase on the very top of the sand, walking on it like he was walking on water, constantly moving before Lee’s whips, waves, or spikes of sand and earth could reach him even as he flung blades out towards him.

 

At some point, blocking a blow for Minato and then grabbing Minato backwards to move out of the Suna-nin’s reach, Lee remarked, “You’re very good, I’ll admit it, you’re better than I am,”

 

The boy made no response towards this, but Lee didn’t seem to expect one, instead, moving the sand like a raging flood around them, she remarked, “But I know something you don’t know.”

 

Oh, oh Minato knew where this was going, honestly, he was almost surprised it hadn’t happened before now.

 

And, stomping her foot, chakra laced in her feet so that the walls themselves began to shake and the boy appeared to lose some of his balance, then two tendrils of sand shot up and wrapped around the his ankles, dragging him into the earth, Lee remarked, “I am not left handed.”

 

“Lee, really?” Minato asked, now was hardly the time for witty banter or quotes out of context.

 

“I’m sorry, Minato, I couldn’t resist,” Lee said with a grin, seeming to ignore the fact, that under normal circumstances, where she wasn’t faking hand seals and still using over powered doton jutsus that one wouldn’t expect from a genin, this kid would have been ground into paste.

 

The Suna nin, being pulled into the earth, offered them a rather worn grin, even as he tried to twist free, clawing at the sand for purchase, “You’re very good too, even if your teammate isn’t.”

 

Minato spared a look back towards Haru, who was now slouched, standing over the Suna nin’s two teammates, apparently waiting for Lee and Minato to finish this on their own. Which… Well, was probably a good choice on his part.

 

Lee also spared a quick glance back, before, with raised eyebrows, “Dead Last is our dead last, and besides, you have two useless teammates.”

 

The boy grinned, and there was a slight vibration, a change in his chakra as it began to circulate across his skin, and he somehow unwittingly quoted ‘The Princess Bride’ back to Lee, “But I also know something you don’t know, I’m not left handed either.”

 

The sand exploded away from his body and the boy vaulted himself over Haru, and then, without hesitation, kicking Haru straight into Lee sending Lee and Haru straight into the wall, then sprinting with kunai in hand to reengage with Minato. Minato blocked the blow and began to move on the defensive, but even then, out of the corner of his eye he saw Lee’s head snap back and hit against the wall with a powerful thud, her body spasming slightly even as Haru fell in a pile to the ground beneath her feet.

 

And then… then things became strange.

 

It was almost as if the ground tilted at a slight angle then rocked itself to another one, like Minato was standing on the bow of a boat instead of on relatively solid earth. As Lee fell slightly forward the walls seemed to grow darker then lighter again, some of the edges of Minato’s vision, or else the world, fading slightly.

 

Then before Minato or their Suna friend could take all of this in, Lee, stepped forward, and with a twitch of her fingers, paralyzed the Suna nin. She hunched over for a moment, looked at the ground, one shaking hand hesitantly fingering the back of her head, then, slowly, she righted herself, and began to stagger forward towards Minato and the frozen genin.

 

Without a word, she summoned their piece of the map, flying out of the shirt of one of the other teammates, into her hand, which she dutifully passed into Minato’s. Then, standing over the frozen nin, considering him, sparing a dazed look towards Minato then back to the boy, she said, “I would sooner destroy a stained-glass window than an artist like yourself. However, since I can’t have you following me either…”

 

Lee dashed the boy on the head with the hilt of her kunai then released the hold on him, watching as he slumped over onto the ground, knocked out.

 

“Please understand I hold you in the highest respect,” Lee said over his body, then, glancing back to Minato, then summoning Haru’s body towards her and hauling him up onto her back with a wince, she groaned out, “Jesus, Minato, what are they feeding these kids? I am… I am not enjoying this head wound.”

 

“You’re bleeding,” Minato said, before ripping a part of his shirt and carefully wrapping it around her head, shifting her headband out of the way before readjusting it over the bandage, trying to ignore the wet blood on his fingers as he moved them away from her head.

 

“Thanks,” Lee said with a small smile, shifting Haru further up onto her back so that his upper body was slumped over her shoulders, “That was… embarrassing, I don’t like being a normal genin.”

 

“No, I don’t think anyone does though,” Minato concurred. 

 

Then, with at first wobbling steps, then ones with slightly more confidence, she started walking forward, Minato joining her even as he looked at their new section of map, stained by the blood of the Suna nin as well as Lee’s.

 

And although it was hardly the time for it, he couldn’t help a small smile, as he noted to Lee, “Oh, look, there’s another sandpit somewhere in here.”

 

For her surprised, barked out laughter, it just might have been worth it.

 

* * *

 

He normally prided himself on his understanding of those around him, it was, after all, half of what had allowed him to rise and become Lord Voldemort. His own brilliance and magical abilities certainly hadn’t hurt, but what had separated him from a mere academic, was that he understood people to their core.

 

More, he took this understanding, and oh so carefully he was able to twist it into something that suited his own purpose, from the very beginning.

 

Slughorn, Dippet, the Malfoys, the Blacks…

 

No, better to count those he had not been able to persuade or contain, that small list that consisted only of two, Mrs. Cole, and of course Albus Dumbledore, and only the latter had any significance whatsoever.

 

Point being, he had always understood people, as Tobirama Senju had so eerily, and easily, gleamed in such a short amount of time.

 

That said, as he sat here at the lowered table, sipping tea and staring across from a grinning Hashirama Senju who, out of nowhere, had decided to join him, he reaffirmed that this was one man who he didn’t understand in the slightest.

 

Reckless, youthful, overeager idiot he had seen before. Oh, Gryffindor had been full of that, nurtured it really, and Dumbledore had recruited hard from that house in those latter days before… Before October 31, 1981.

 

How many times had he looked at the young Sirius Black across the battlefield, little more than a schoolboy, and thought, “This boy is going to get himself killed before he’s twenty”?

 

However, a small but usually overlooked fact, the Gryffindor brand of stupidity was not the same thing as bravery, honor, or valor. They had forgotten, over the years, what those concepts truly meant just as Slytherin had forgotten that ambition was not synonymous with pedigree. Ordinary school girls and school boys did not possess these qualities, such things were hard won only by the most extraordinary of individuals, and only those who had seen and tasted true fear and war before.

 

It was a difficult thing, he’d always thought, to be truly brave.

 

However, Hashirama Senju was of an entirely different ilk, though he appeared young, approaching either in his late twenties or mid-thirties, it was hard to tell, there was a confidence to him along with his strange emotional whiplash, and more, from what he’d been able to understand and what he’d seen, the man’s ideals were genuine.

 

Surreal as it sounded, here was a man who had reportedly, through his mad vision alone, a vision that no one had believed in, not even his ever-loyal younger brother, brought about, for what these people, constituted an era of peace from the blood-soaked clan wars.

 

There was something in that accomplishment, along with the accomplishments of Godric Gryffindor, perhaps even more than Gryffindor’s accomplishments, that even a man such as Voldemort, could admire.

 

However, this was merely his reputation, in person…

 

Well, in person, he’d witnessed this man bawling, out of nowhere, much to the exasperation of his younger brother, like the crocodile tears at the soap operas on television were a regular occurrence.

 

For the first time in his life, he was well, and truly, baffled by another human being.

 

“So, Ren, Tobi says that you and he have started playing shogi,” the man said, smiling at him as if this was the greatest thing Hashirama had ever heard and he was just so proud of his foreign prisoner Ren for reaching out to his younger brother.

 

As if ignoring the fact completely that Tobirama Senju did not trust him at all and with ample reason.

 

“Yes,” he answered slowly, sipping his tea and wondering when this man would leave from whence he came, “He’s better than I am.”

 

And what a strange thing, to say those words and mean them, of course it was only shogi, a game the second had been playing for years and he had only just picked up, but none the less, he had never said those words before and ever meant them.

 

Such acts of humility had been empty flattery at best.

 

“Oh, Tobi’s better than everybody at shogi,” Hashirama said as if this was a given that his younger brother could expect to be the most brilliant man to walk into any room. Then again, from what he’d heard and seen, this could very well be true.

 

And once again, as he looked at this man who gave every impression of being an idiot, he wondered how those two could possibly be related.

 

Perhaps in frame, Tobirama was a bit leaner than Hashirama, but his older brother wasn’t a large man either. However, Tobirama was excessively pale and had that strange white hair and red eyes while his brother had tanned skin and dark brown hair with an entirely different texture. Even their faces barely resembled one another.

 

Not to mention they had entirely different personalities.

 

There must have been an affair in there somewhere, or an adoption….

 

“Still, it’s good for him to play again, he got tired of playing me when we were still children and I don’t think he and Mito have played in years. Plus, when we built Konoha, none of us seemed to have any time for it. Retirement’s kind of nice in that respect, at least, suddenly we both have more free time than we know what to do with. I don’t think I’ve ever had this much time to spend around the compound before. Of course, I have no idea what he got up to when I… Well, all the same, it’s good to see him playing someone,” Hashirama said, rubbing the back of his head in embarrassment as his grin became impossibly larger, “Better you than a younger me, as honestly, it was a bit embarrassing at the time and father was never, well, thrilled about the clan heir losing to his much younger brother.”

 

He nodded as if he understood this point, and he did, to some extent. Clan heirs and heirs of noble lines he doubted were very different from one another, and there had been plenty of heirs among the Death Eaters, and he had seen what their fathers had expected of them.

 

Or, in Regulus’ case, the spare.

 

However, given the differences he’d seen already, he had the feeling that making broad comparisons like that wasn’t… always apt.

 

“You’re getting very good at our language,” Hashirama noted, which, really, he did not need to provide that condescending type of complement.

 

Once, men would have been dead for saying something like that.

 

Now he just had to sit here and take it with a smile.

 

“Well, I… not much choice,” he said, wincing, speaking was harder than listening was, if only because he had to listen to himself stumble over tenses and words and honorifics.

 

“True,” Hashirama said and then in a brighter more cheerful tone, “Although we’ve been working on English, well, more after that exams are over, but we’ll have to have a conversation then. Oh, I’ll have to come up with something very exciting to say.”

 

“The… exams?” he asked, repeating the unfamiliar word, although it did sound like one that he had perhaps heard in passing.

 

God, how he hated not being fluent.

 

“Oh, the chunin exams,” Hashirama said, still smiling, how could a man smile so much and so freely, be so at ease looking like an utter fool, “My brother came up with that, actually. Each shinobi has a rank, genin, chunin, and jonin. To advance to the next ranking you have to take an exam, passing the academy exam to become a genin, the chunin exam to become a chunin, and the jonin exam to become a jonin.”

 

“Easy enough,” he said, but by the suddenly sheepish expression on the honorable first’s face, this was not quite correct.

 

Hashirama offered a shrug along with a now somewhat embarrassed smile, “Well, it can get a little more complicated than that, there are tokebetsu jonin for example, oh and medic nin too, and a lot of specializations, but it’s close. Anyways, the chunin exams are happening in Suna this year, so Lee-chan and Minato-kun, are over there right now with Kushina-chan.”

 

Kushina, so that’s where that little hellion had been recently, he’d almost been hoping she’d died somewhere, but no one had seemed upset enough for this to be the case. Especially since Kushina Uzumaki was their… distant niece? That was also unclear, suffice that she was a member of Mito’s clan and seemed to have become Hashirama’s and Tobirama’s honorary granddaughter (or perhaps daughter, they both seemed to act… older than they should, every now and then and it was very odd).

 

“They are moving up to chunin?” he asked and then, brow furrowed played the words over in his head and tried to make sense of them, “Is it usual for someone so… young?”

 

Here a darker, sadder, edge entered Hashirama’s smile, “It used to be worse, during the clan wars, there used to be no rankings at all, but… To take the exams, no, to pass, usually genin are a few years older.”

 

“And they’ll pass?”

 

Hashirama nodded vigorously as if there was no doubt at all in the world that Eleanor Lily Potter would pass her exams, “Oh yes, everyone’s expecting it, it would be very… odd, for Lee-chan especially, not to pass. Minato-kun too, for that matter, and even Kushina-chan.”

 

So, Eleanor Potter was that talented, well… Perhaps that was to be expected, but more, more there was this unnerving feeling inside of him that Ellie Potter, Eru Lee as they insisted, had long since been assimilated into this culture.

 

The four houses of Hogwarts, this idea of compartmentalizing traits, would be just as foreign to her as it would to any of these other shinobi, as their practices were to him. And here, here she would advance quickly to through the ranks, easily surpassing a Hogwarts graduate long before the age of seventeen.

 

And if Eleanor Potter didn’t want to return home then… Then where did that leave him?

 

“Are you alright?”

 

“Yes, thinking,” he said and then, “We… We do not have chunin in _England_.”

 

Something in the man’s expression fell at that, and it was all too clear that he was picturing a world far different from the one Voldemort had come from. Instead, picturing the world he had grown up in, where children slaughtered one another for land and resources.

 

Though, perhaps the fact that it had been little more than children in England’s civil war, young men and women just graduated Hogwarts, fighting against him… Well, a twenty-year-old to these people was an adult many years over, hardly a comparison.

 

Either way he quickly clarified to the best of his ability.

 

“Until seventeen our children are… academy students, they attend an academy for jutsus, but _English_ jutsus are not fighting, most don’t fight, they’re taught… defense,” he paused, trying to think of the words and failing to find them, “We don’t have shinobi in _England_.” 

 

He didn’t know why he felt compelled to say this, perhaps just to see the look on Hashirama Senju’s face, that look of non-comprehension, of growing fascination, as he contemplated a world in which children lived to adulthood without war, and were only taught self-defense if even that.

 

Perhaps it was to plant a fascination with England, a desire to create ties, one step closer to getting him home regardless of whether Ellie Potter wanted to go back or not…

 

Because if her superiors told her to she would go back even if she was kicking and screaming the whole time and he would make sure to be there when she did.

 

But perhaps, perhaps it was something he had to say aloud, just to cement in how far he was from everything he knew, from Hogwarts, from Gryffindors, Hufflepuffs, Slytherins, and Ravenclaws, from the ministry and its endless bureaucracy, and how that distance terrified him.

 

* * *

 

Dead Last was muttering nonsensically in her ear again, not anything intelligible, just strange syllables slurred together as he came into consciousness, then, predictably, went back out of it again. He was also starting to feel very heavy, draped across her back like this, she had to say, even for Dead Last, this was a level of uselessness he’d never reached before.

 

She was starting to think whatever swirly magic eyes the giant peach had given him were something of a rip off.

 

As for herself, well, her head was still throbbing in and out of time with her heartbeat, but it was manageable enough. The worst of it though was Jiraiya’s dumb rules, if she’d just frozen them all in the beginning they wouldn’t have this kind of problem. Dead Last might even still be walking, although he had looked about ready to collapse after event he first few hours, certainly Lee wouldn’t have a massive headache.

 

Instead she’d tried to be a good genin, and get creative with elemental jutsus here and there faking hand seals and everything, and she’d ended up being slammed into a wall by Dead Last’s too heavy adolescent body. As for the labyrinth, it just kept on going, thankfully the second map had proved slightly more useful than the first, in that Minato had found a place to set up camp, and now, Lee could finally drop Dead Last for all he was worth, and sit down, casting a genjutsu around them to deflect any other team passing by, and hardening a wave of sand overhead to act as a canopy above them.

 

Minato moved towards her, moved her headband up and unwound the makeshift bandage, now nicely covered in blood, then, frowning at her, moving a finger in front of her eyes and looking at her pupils, he said, “I think you may have a concussion.”

 

“Great,” Lee said, that would explain the headaches and the nausea.

 

Minato sighed then spared a glance for Dead Last, who was trying to sit up and then lying back down, taking an actual nap this time as chakra deprivation really starting to take its toll, that poor bastard.

 

“Haru was right, clearly, one of us has to learn medical jutsus,” Minato said with a sigh, leaning back and wiping his face with a hand still sporting dried blood as well as copious amounts of dirt.

 

And by someone, he probably meant himself, as she doubted Jiraiya would ever trust her enough to patch up someone else’s body, unless, well, they were already dead.

 

Lee however, brushed this off, “I’m fine, I may be slightly nauseous, and I may desperately want to take a nap, and I might not be in a mood for another showdown, but I’m fine,” then pausing, she added, “Besides, I’ve lost all patience with pretenses, so it should go much smoother now.”

 

“Right,” Minato said, and in this was the thought that he didn’t think that was a great idea, but Lee didn’t particularly care.

 

“We should just summon every team’s map and be on our way,” Lee said but Minato was shaking his head.

“No, we’re doing fine, we’ve covered a lot of ground already, we’ll be fine,” he said, and it looked like he believed it, even as his eyes fluttered closed. Still, she believed him, if things became truly hectic, then he’d undoubtedly suggest she show more of her hand.

 

So, for now, stopping for a few hours, then resuming at a snail’s pace, it would be enough.

 

Besides, she could neutralize all the traps easily enough, now that she was giving up pretenses, and that was where all the time went, into avoiding, disarming, or having to deal with the consequences of all the different traps.

 

“Really, Lee, nothing drastic, please,” Minato added, not even opening his eyes to look at her.

 

“How did you know I was thinking of anything drastic?” Lee asked, and there was a small smile on his lips.

“Because, we always end up doing something drastic,” he said with a small laugh, “It’s what we do it’s… It’s MinatoandLee.”

 

“Well, I wasn’t,” Lee said, “I’m playing by Jiraiya’s rules… Mostly.”

 

“Mostly,” Minato repeated.

 

“Mostly is pretty damn good,” Lee said before pointing to her head and the bandage, “I got concussed for my trouble, by an eight-year-old.”

 

“I thought you admired that eight-year-old,” Minato helpfully pointed out as he slunk down into a lying position, clearly preparing to catch sleep while he still could, which probably wasn’t a half bad plan.

 

“I respect that Sand eight-year-old, however, if we were out in the wild and I didn’t have to deal with Jiraiya’s weird restrictions then I would have wiped the floor with him.”

 

And that was an undeniable fact, even if he had been a speedy little bastard with a mean punch, still, hadn’t helped him avoid the paralysis of doom effect. Oh, Lee missed her overwhelmingly powerful jutsus already. 

 

“Because you aren’t left-handed?” Minato asked.

 

“Right, because I’m not left-handed,” Lee confirmed, a smile growing on her own lips, despite the headache.

 

“Well, I look forward to when you don’t have Jiraiya’s rules either,” Minato said, “Even if we do have to fight plant zombies again.”

 

“Oh, tough choice, plant zombies or Jiraiya’s arbitrary jutsu rules…” Lee said, and it really was, because on the one hand, she hated plant zombies, but on the other hand, she had just gotten concussed because she couldn’t use terrifying blood limit abilities.

 

“I don’t know Minato I…” she trailed off, he was already sleeping, him and Dead Last.

 

Still, the quiet would be nice while it lasted.

 

* * *

 

Suna, being an odd place that wasn’t quite as into the whole teamwork thing as Konoha, allowed apprentice genin to take the exams. Which was good for Kushina, as honestly, everyone she really knew and was friends with was already on their own team, and otherwise she would have just been paired up with whatever random genin hadn’t passed it in prior years.

 

Still, that’d been all well and good for the first round, where she’d been compared against other single scores, but even with being given three portions of the map and starting closer to the finish, she was starting to feel her disadvantages in not having teammates come in.

 

Namely, having to sprint every time she’d seen anyone coming while somehow disabling all the other traps at the same time even while she laid out her own. Point being, she was getting kind of tired, and once again feeling a bit put out for missing out on that whole genin team experience.

 

(Especially since, in the back of her head, there was that haunting acknowledgement that she was Mito’s apprentice, she was a Konoha ninja, because Kushina was going to be the next kyuubi jinchuuriki.)

 

Wheezing slightly, feeling her fair skin burn even after the sun had already long since set, Kushina considered her options. She needed to create some sort of alliance with a Konoha team. All the ones she didn’t know were right out, and teams like Uchiha Fugaku’s were right out as well… Really, Mikoto’s team would probably be best, but even then, Kushina didn’t really know Mikoto’s teammates all that well.

 

“Oh, I’m so stupid,” she said to herself, the answer of which team was obvious, team seven.

 

Lee, Minato, and Haru were probably frolicking through this place without a care in the world plus Kushina was sort of kind of friends with Lee and, well, Minato was a kind of sort of friendly rival. They wouldn’t mind Kushina bringing her own awesomeness to the table.

 

Plus, concentrating and searching for a giant super nova of chakra, Lee was pretty easy to find if she wasn’t actively dampening her own chakra. Well, that wasn’t quite true, there was an art to finding Lee, sometimes her chakra signature felt so large that all of Konoha was swamped in it, same with this labyrinth, if you didn’t know how to pin it down, really pin it down, you’d think she was all over the place.

 

Still, Kushina had practice in hunting down Lee and Minato.

 

So, armed with her maps as well as the memory of where she’d already been, Kushina navigated her way through the labyrinth until she found Minato, Lee, and Haru standing in front of a pair of doors guarded by two puppets who watched the team with dulled eyes. Well, Minato and Lee were standing, Dead Last looked about two seconds from passing out and was sitting down right now.

 

“Please, just pick one,” Haru said but Minato and Lee didn’t seem to be paying him any attention, “I thought you said you knew this one, Lee.”

 

“Well, under normal circumstances, with only one question, we ask either of them which door the other would point to. If we ask the one that always tells the truth, then he would tell us that the liar would point to the door which leads to our death, if we ask the liar, then he would say that the truth puppet would point to the door which leads to our death. So, given all that, we clearly pick the door they didn’t tell us,” Lee finished, as if all of that made any sense whatsoever, though Minato seemed to be nodding along as they stared at the clay puppets in front of them.

 

“Then ask already,” Haru moaned out, rubbing a hand through his hair, “Those few hours of sleep were not enough to get me recovered.”

 

“Well, see but this is also the chunin exams, and ninjas are sneaky bastards, they could both be lying,” Lee pointed out, “So really, it’s more of a, how much do I think this is a cheating test versus a thinking test. Minato?”

 

Minato sighed as he considered this, rubbing the back of his head, “Well, if both lead to our certain death, then clearly it can’t hurt to ask on the assumption that one of them actually does tell the truth and one always lies.”

 

“I don’t like the sound of certain death,” Lee replied with a rather skeptical frown, “I’m not really in the mood for it.”

 

“Well, certain death is a bit of an exaggeration, I believe they save that sort of thing for the jonin exams,” Minato said, “Either way, I vote we ask your question.”

 

“Hey, guys!”

 

Minato and Lee turned in tandem to look back at Kushina, Haru’s head turning with them, Lee blinked once, then twice, “Oh, hey Kushina, how are you doing?”

 

“Awesome, as always, believe it!” Kushina said, almost on reflex with her giant grin before allowing it to drop and sheepishly admitting, “Well, actually, running this thing by myself is kind of hard. I was hoping we could strike an alliance.”

 

“Strike an alliance?” Minato asked with raised eyebrows, and oh, he was going to make this difficult, wasn’t he?

 

“I thought I was a flakey bastard,” Minato said rather humorlessly, which just went to show how flakey he could be.

 

“Hey, but at least we know each other,” Kushina pointed out, “Plus I’ve got three maps, three maps in this section even. You could use my help, believe it!”

 

“Well, we are down a team member,” Lee said to Minato, except loud enough so that everyone could very clearly hear, including Haru.

 

“You know, Lee, I can hear you.”

 

“Yes,” Lee acknowledged, motioning towards him, “But you can’t deny it either.”

 

“Anyways, I think we’re pretty close to the end, I started closer than most to the exit since I’m a one-man army,” Kushina said and then furrowed her brow, because really, that meant team seven had gotten through all of it pretty quickly, Kushina had mostly run into single apprentices like herself, she didn’t think she’d seen another team yet.

 

“That’s good to hear,” Minato said with an actual smile this time, “I’m honestly getting kind of tired of this place.”

 

“Do you know where the exit is, then?” Lee asked and Kushina shook her head.

 

“I said we’re closer, not that close, I have no idea where it is,” really, if she’d known that it would have made her life much easier, she probably could have been done ages ago.

 

Haru stood, hobbled over to their little circle, readjusting his sunglasses and looking way different than he had even a few weeks before with his white hair and all, and asked, “How’d you find us so fast anyway?”

 

“Oh, I just looked for Lee’s chakra signature,” Kushina said, “She’s really easy to find if she’s not paying attention to it, well, and if you know how to look.”

 

“Really?” Lee asked, clearly never really having thought of this before, which made sense as Lee’s aura fluxuated from being terrifyingly large to… less terrifyingly large.

 

“Well, sort of, there’s a trick to it,” Kushina hedged, “Either way, I just looked for Lee and here I am.”

 

A bright spark appeared in Minato’s eye as he took in Kushina’s grin, his eyes then drifting to Lee, “Lee, do you think you could dampen that down a bit, maybe as little chakra leaking from you as possible?”

 

Lee nodded, “Sure, but why?”

 

“We probably haven’t run into that many teams because they don’t know Kushina’s… trick, to find us. But if you lessen it slightly, then you’ll be a large beacon, drawing everyone in, and we can start collecting more maps without even having to move from here,” Minato stated, and then, with a brighter grin and more enthusiasm, “If we bicker loudly enough, about really inane and stupid things, then anyone from Konoha will know to run in the other direction but everyone else will think we’re fair game.”

 

That was… surprisingly underhanded, and honestly more of an idea she’d expect Lee to have come up with, but Kushina liked it.

 

“We still have two and a half days to kill,” Kushina said, “And it’d be nice to have a better lay of the land, I’d rather not run into puppets again if I don’t have to.”

 

“And I like the idea of setting up traps rather than springing them,” Minato said, looking directly at Lee and Kushina, because yes, Kushina and Lee were probably among the best damn trap makers that Konoha had ever seen.

 

“I think, pretty boy, that I’m looking forward to this,” Kushina said with an anticipatory grin, one that grew even wider as Minato gave her a rather exasperated and unamused look.

 

“Uzumaki, I look forward to kicking your ass when this is all over.”

 

“You’ve got it, flake! It’s on, blondie, believe it!”

 

* * *

 

Jiraiya, watching team seven and little Uzumaki as sunrise approached, surrounded by the knocked-out bodies of other villages’ genin, the Konoha genin at least having the good sense to run in the other direction, could only sit there and wish he was drinking.

 

Especially as, as team seven and Uzumaki had proceeded to fish genin teams for the past five hours, playing cards to pass the time in between massacres and looking like they were having a grand old time in their fuinjutsu death trap (which, he knew Minato-kun and Kushina-chan were good, and that Lee-chan made some hellish traps on her own, but he hadn’t realized just how terrifying relatively basic traps could be if you were given enough set up time and creativity), every jonin-sensei had turned to give him a rather blank look in deathly silence.

 

Then Sarutobi-sensei turning, with his kage hat firmly on his head, to give him a rather blank, nonplussed look that didn’t tell Jiraiya whether he was pleased or displeased or somewhere in between.

 

And Jiraiya, just sitting there, watching all of this, and eventually just awkwardly blurting in the silence, “Well, at least they understand teamwork… and leadership.”

 

As Oro could have predicted, or Tsunade-hime for that matter, no one had anything to say to that.

 

* * *

 

The four of them stared over the multitude of maps which now covered the sand of their base of operations, many of them slightly bloodstained, but all of them confirming that all paths to the exit were filled with unpleasant things.

 

“Sandpit,” Lee finally concluded as she stared down at the paths they could take from here, “We haven’t run into a sandpit yet, it’s probably better than puppets, which I’ve learned are the least amount of fun.”

 

“No, that makes them worse, the others at least we’ve dealt with before,” Minato said, grimacing as he looked down at the maps, particularly the paths that lead to ‘hidden spikes’ which had always been barrels of fun.

 

“I’m actually with flakey bastard on this, sandpit sounds too benign,” Kushina added, for once agreeing with Minato, which honestly, seemed to be against her very nature.

 

“I’m kind of indifferent,” Dead Last said with a sigh, “They all sound awful, and I probably won’t be any help with any of them.”  


Well that was a given, still, at least he admitted it.

 

Lee’s eyes drifted up, to the walls themselves, true they were laced with fuinjutsu that electrocuted you as soon as you touched it and made it impossible to climb over them or under them, but fuinjutsu could be counteracted, and they were made of hardened sand.

 

Why, with careful application, one could expect a doton jutsu to tunnel right through them. And, from where they were standing, it was pretty much a straight walk to the exit.

 

“Hey, why don’t we forget all of that and build our own path,” Lee said, “I’m really getting the hang of this doton jutsu thing, I think I can build us a bridge or else tunnel us through.”

 

Minato and Kushina both sort of stared at her, then Minato, hesitantly, pointed out, “You know they’re reinforced by seals, don’t you, and remember we thought about that in the beginning but Suna’s not that stupid.”

 

“Yes, well, I’ve had enough of this place, and sand, and puppets…” Lee trailed off and shrugged, summoned the maps into her hands and then placed them back into Minato’s storage scroll, “They can just assume that I’m the greatest doton jutsu wielding genin to have ever lived.”

 

With hands brought together, rapidly moving through what she hoped were convincing hand seals, Lee gathered her energy, gave a great cry of, “Giant sand pillar of doom no jutsu!”, and from the sand in front of them them, and sent out a jet of earth that proceeded to bulldoze its way through the walls, then, on the sand they were standing on, she pushed it forward so that she, Dead Last, Minato, and Uzumaki were all catapulted straight to the exit without time for any other genin team to sneeze.

 

And, on the dismount, with another rapid-fire series of hand seals and a cry of, “Rebuild giant walls no jutsu!” Regrew the solid walls once again and restored the labyrinth to its former glory. Leaving team seven and Uzumaki to stare back at where they’d came, conquered, and left.

 

Minato looked at Uzumaki, Dead Last, then finally Lee, appearing somewhat stunned. Then, looking forward, they each took their final steps out of the labyrinth, finishing the second task in record time, with a day and a half to spare, and piles of genin left in their wake.


	21. Dead Last II: Electric Boogaloo

_In which the flames of Minato and Kushina’s rivalry grow that much hotter as their possible one on one battle approaches, Jiraiya tries and fails to make an appropriate analogy, and the kages gossip._

 

* * *

When all your kids plus an extra one slaughtered the chunin exams in record time, slaughtering the very infrastructure of the exam for good manner, while you were in a foreign village still awaiting that third and final phase of the exam, there really was only one thing you could do.

 

Well, he wanted to lecture them to death, especially Lee, and or bemoan his woes to an unsympathetic Orochimaru and or Tsunade but neither of those options were available. The second because Oro and Tsuande were back in Konoha and the first because giving Lee the lecture she deserved would be saying, out loud, in a foreign village crawling with ANBU, that Lee had a lot more up her sleeve and that her extravagant kage level dotun jutsus and alarmingly strong genjutsus were actually the tip of the iceberg.

 

Point being, that conversation was just going to have to wait until Konoha, plus it’d be that much more intimidating if it also came from the hokage. He was pretty sure that everything he said to Lee went in one ear and then right back out the other, or at the very least, was carefully considered then completely disregarded.

 

So, he did the next best thing, he invited his cute little tadpoles out for dinner (well, along with Uzumaki out of pity since Mito, the shodaime, or the nidaime weren’t leaving the village for obvious reasons), to one of those overpriced few and far between Suna restaurants to celebrate their success thus far. Only, this time, it wasn’t just the civilians staring, no, every other table was filled either with some other team taking their brats out for a meal or else Suna nins. And yes, over there at one of the tables that was far too close for Jiraiya’s comfort were the honorable siblings of Sunagakure, Chiyo leering at him with no shame whatsoever.

 

Good god that woman was terrifying.

 

Well, he guessed it just went to show, that apparently the entire village really had been watching the exams.

 

At least they were being polite enough to keep their distance, that or Jiraiya’s own growing ill humor apparently was enough to ward them off, either way, so far none of them had tried to talk to them yet in the spirit of peace and inter-village cooperation.

 

And that was fine by Jiraiya.

 

His eyes drifted to the kids, Uzumaki and Minato bickering while Lee dug into one of the cheaper appetizers that Jiraiya had bought for the table and Haru just watched with a somewhat exasperated and fatigued expression. At least they were having a good time.

 

Still, looking at them, his mind wandered back to the results so far and what it would mean for the rest of the exam.

 

Konoha did well enough, extremely well, compared to the other villages. Several their teams didn’t make the time limit, well, those teams that hadn’t already been cut in the first round. But still, of the three villages participating they’d had the most teams make it through.

 

His own team had obviously finished along with Uzumaki, well before the deadline and screwing over pretty much every other team in the meantime.

 

Uchiha Mikoto’s team had scraped by. The Uchiha girl’s sharingan, an oddly advanced iteration of it allowed her to breeze not only through the first part of the exam but also through this second task by allowing her to disable traps much quicker than others, particularly those based on genjutsu, though it didn’t help her divine a way closer to the exit. That said, it was clear that she had played the lead, and that compared to her, her teammates were average and best considered dead weight.

 

The Hyuga twins had gotten through with the dirty cheating known as the byukagen, allowing them to see through the walls and to the exit, the only thing slowing them down being the traps they had no choice but to confront.

 

The Inuzuka and Aurubame clan heirs combined with the likely future clan head Uchiha Fugaku succeeded due to their tracking abilities, namely, tracking down team seven before Lee had given up on the exam entirely and then figuring it out from there. A somewhat admirable if unconventional solution.

 

And that left the last team, the Nara, Yamanaka, and Akimichi team which had somehow made it through with wits alone and strategically following the path of destruction team seven had left in their wake and then getting fairly lucky, only just barely managing to find their way through.

 

Basically, everyone you would have placed a bet on passing did, but there were no real surprises, anyone who had been on the fence, or didn’t have someone with a clear advantage and or ridiculous blood limits on their team hadn’t made the cut.

 

This left the odd smattering of completely green genin and a few returnees.

 

And that wasn’t even getting to Sand or Mist, who hadn’t fared nearly as well.

 

Only two sand teams had managed to get through, unsurprisingly the ones containing the two boys Chiyo had said were worth keeping eyes on. Oddly enough, it was because both had managed to avoid the slaughter that Lee had caused in the middle of the task. The first, the team with the younger blonde Yashamaru, because Lee and Minato had taken them out relatively early, giving them time to recover and miss the fishing scheme that occurred later. The second because they’d arrived slightly late to the slaughter and had the sense to stop and use their heads, noting that every team that followed the path to confront them hadn’t come back, instead they’d avoided team seven like the plague and struggled their way through the exam eventually making it to the exit in the nick of time.

 

Mist had done embarrassingly worse than this, none of their teams making it. It seemed that they’d hit a dry spell this generation, possibly because they kept killing each other all the damn time. He supposed that they were due for one, every village had off years now and then, but either way it seemed that every Kiri genin had gotten the shit kicked out of them by Lee and company during the great genin massacre and none had managed to recover in time to make it to the exit.

 

The mizukage, naturally, was fuming.

 

As it was the Sarutobi-sensei and the kazekage, supposedly after some hem-hawing, had given Kiri three slots in the next round out of pity, that, or to make the bracket easier on everyone and not have to deal with an abundance of wild card rounds.

 

Yes, Jiraiya wasn’t envying Sarutobi-sensei right now.

 

Still, for a tournament, what did this leave? Fifteen from Konoha, six from Suna, three from Kiri, so twenty-four total. Sixteen or thirty-two would have been a more ideal number, but he supposed you took what you were given. That meant twelve were out in the first round, then six, then three with the odd semi-final of two battling then some lucky bastard getting to battle the victor to be champion of the chunin exam. For whatever that was worth, anyway.

 

That made five rounds of this? Not too bad, all considered, especially since that first round would start tomorrow and act as more of an elimination round than anything. Either way, everything should wrap up within the month, which would be about when everyone was ready to go home.

 

Not that Jiraiya wasn’t ready to go home already.

 

“You’re pretty quiet, sensei.”

 

Jiraiya looked up to find Haru staring at him, or well, staring at him behind those black aviators. And good god, if he hadn’t spent so long looking at the kid’s face he’d barely have recognized him with the glasses as well as the shockingly white hair. He wondered what his parents had had to say about that.

 

Or about great grandmother Uzumaki Miho.

 

“Just thinking,” Jiraiya said with a sigh, “What about you kids, looking forward to the next part of the exams? It’s a tournament, you know, which means you’ll likely be facing genin from Konoha in combat.”

 

Haru paled, his lips twisting into a grimace that said more than enough, probably that he’d been hoping to have somehow been disqualified by this point. The others however, turned their attention towards him, and appeared much more confident.

 

“Sure, although I have to say, sensei, I thought this thing was supposed to be a lot harder,” Lee said with a small shrug, “I can’t believe people have to repeat this.”

 

Jiraiya felt his own smile become somewhat strained, “Well, Lee-chan, maybe, if you thought about the skill level of a normal genin, you’d realize that the chunin exams are not, in fact, easy. Besides, passing or not passing a portion of the exam isn’t always indicative of who becomes a chunin.”

 

Like, if Lee didn’t have S-ranked abilities, and if she didn’t show some strange eccentric form of leadership and teamwork and thinking outside of boxes, then there was no way in hell he’d ever promote her to chunin. Even though her being promoted to chunin at this point was almost a given. And at the rate she was going she probably would be at least tokebetsu jonin by next year.

 

Because having a chunin with those kinds of abilities was almost as embarrassing as having an S-ranked genin.

 

Either way, if they were in Konoha he wouldn’t have to mince his words as he reminded her that he’d told her to tone it down and that making sand jutsus on the spot and calling it dotun jutsus was not, in any way, toning anything down.

 

“Well, I’m looking forward to kicking Namikaze’s girly ass,” Kushina exclaimed, sticking out her tongue towards the boy in question, “It’s going to be an ass-kicking to remember, believe it!”

 

That girl did not mince words, Jiraiya hadn’t seen too much of her, but even he was starting to notice a general theme in her conversations with Minato.

 

“Are you still on about that, Uzumaki?” Minato asked with more irritation than he usually allowed himself, “You do realize we might not even end up fighting each other.”

 

“I think you’re just scared to lose and embarrass yourself in front of Lee,” Uzumaki proclaimed along with extravagant hand gestures and a grin that was much too large, “Which, really, I can’t blame you, because she’ll likely never think as highly about you again and you’ll become Dead Last Two: Electric Boogaloo.”

 

Well, that was a Lee-ism if he’d ever heard one, at the sound of it even Lee gave a surprised blink as she mulled over that final term, probably trying to think if she’d called anyone or anything that before.

 

As it was, Haru certainly noticed, and didn’t appreciate the coining of new even worse nicknames for himself.

 

“Thanks, Kushina,” Haru groused, “For dragging me into your weird territorial battle with Minato.”

 

However, neither Minato nor Kushina seemed to pay him much attention as they continued to focus on their own bickering.

 

“Oh, believe me, Uzumaki, if it were within my power I would make you eat sand for months with three villages for witnesses,” Minato replied with a far too cheerful smile and a small charming laugh even while the very air between the two of them seemed to hum with lightning.

 

“In your dreams, blondie,” Kushina said, crossing her arms with an indignant huff, as if Minato was completely and utterly beneath her.

 

“Enjoy your delusions of grandeur while they last, tomato,” Minato retorted, an almost Oro like sly grin appearing on his face, and good god that expression didn’t belong on his face, Jiraiya hadn’t even realized Minato was capable of that kind of a smile.

 

What was wrong with those two? If Jiraiya didn’t know any better, and hadn’t seen the eerie relationship between Minato and Lee in action, he’d have said they were playing the adolescent version of the will-they-won’t-they game.

 

As it was Namikaze Minato and Uzumkai Kushina just had this strangely intense rivalry, reminiscent of his and Oro’s rivalry back in the day, with Eru Lee as this almost indifferent third wheel.

 

Well, if Orochimaru had been a girl, and attractive, and less of a dick.

 

Actually, in this situation it was probably the cooler-headed Minato who was playing the role of adolescent Orochimaru, well, a less stuck-up ice queen version of Orochimaru while boisterous Uzumaki Kushina was the cocky braggart Jiraiya, desperately trying and failing to impress Senju Tsunade-hime. Except… In that scenario, then Lee clearly was Tsunade-hime, chronically unimpressed by Uzumaki the Jiraiya’s tactics and far more appreciative of genius Minato the Orochimaru, which only fueled Uzumaki the Jiraiya’s ridiculous rivalry with Minato the Orochimaru, which only made Minato the Orochimaru that much less impressed…

 

And clearly this analogy was going off the rails and he needed to stop thinking about it before he concluded that Orochimaru wanted to be in Jiraiya’s pants or else that Uzumaki Kushina wanted to be in Lee’s.

 

As if to emphasize this point, between bites of food Lee finally chimed in with her usual serenity, “Uzumaki, just so you know, if we end up fighting before Minato has a chance to publicly humiliate you in a match-up, I’m not going to show you any mercy.”

 

Which basically translated to Kushina being out of the running.

 

“Lee, you know you’re supposed to support me in this, right?” Uzumaki said, actually looking a bit insulted, and oh boy, maybe she was trying to get Lee’s attention, “We serious non-fangirl kunoichi have to stick together!”

 

Lee considered this for a moment, before sparing a glance to Minato and asking, “Minato, what’s a fangirl?”

 

And on that note, Jiraiya felt he should interrupt before the conversation derailed completely, “At any rate, just remember brats, try not to let your success so far go to your heads.”

 

Not that it was going to their heads, Minato, despite fanning the flames of his rivalry with Uzumaki seemed as even-keeled as ever, Haru as filled with despair and foreboding as ever, and Lee at her most Lee, when, if she had any decency at all, she’d be at her least Lee.

 

None the less, Jiraiya continued, “Also, not sure if you’ve been told this or not, but this first round is more an elimination round than anything else. After this we’ll have a few weeks to continue training to help you face whoever is left until eventually there’s only one genin left standing. Of course, I’ll just reiterate this, losing doesn’t mean you won’t become a chunin, and winning doesn’t mean you will, it’s more in how you fight and approach any given problem.”

 

Jiraiya then looked straight at Lee, “Like, for example, following a sensei’s very reasonable guidelines during the final portion of the exam.”

 

Lee, blinking, and then nodding at him with a stupid smile on her face, clearly wasn’t getting it. Perversely, Jiraiya hoped that a miracle would happen, and that Minato would kick her ass.

 

* * *

 

The sun was shining, if there was grass in Suna it probably would have been green, but the sand was a comforting shade of yellow, and Haru was about to die. Or, at the very least, be hospitalized.

 

He was standing inside the arena, sweating under the morning sun (and why was it so bright when it was still so early in the day, not even close to noon yet), and he was one of the first two victims in this round for the chunin exams, about to face his death at the hands of a Kiri nin who undoubtedly had fond memories of either Lee, Minato, or Uzumaki beating him into submission while Haru had sat by uselessly playing solitaire while trying his best not to pass out again.

 

Either way, staring out from behind his sunglasses, holding his initial fighting stance, feeling the sweat roll down the back of his neck, and that ever present fatigue leaking through him as he hemorrhaged chakra, Haru thought the results were more than clear.

 

This was to be the last clear-headed moment of his life, and he was spending it sweating, feeling rather light-headed, anticipating his pummeling by a vengeful Kiri genin.

 

And on his gravestone Lee would engrave “Here lies Dead Last, fondly known by his comrades as Sunglasses Magoo. Somehow, after eating a magical peach, he became even more useless. He once got kidnapped by my emotionally supportive clone.”

 

The referee announced the beginning of the fight, Haru began to move, circling his opponent to prevent him from getting a good first hit in while he delayed the inevitable. Although, oddly enough, and maybe because he was just too used to facing Minato or Lee who knew all his unimpressive tactics, he dodged or at least blocked every move made towards him. Of course, this was probably because he himself kept in constant movement, and because the Kiri bastard was toying with him.

 

Sometimes Lee, like a cat, would play with her food before she destroyed it entirely.

 

With one block he felt his sunglasses slip slightly, his eyes connecting with the genin’s who paled at the sight of them before Haru managed to push the glasses back up his nose even as he used his other hand to swipe out with a kunai, and surprisingly, managed to get a decent cut in before the Kiri nin darted backwards.

 

However, Haru was too busy watching his life flash before his eyes to pay this much attention, or at least, as much attention as it probably deserved. To his horror, much of his internal flashback was devoted to Eru Lee or some iteration of her in the form of a clone. Everywhere he looked, there she was along with Minato, laughing at something or else calling him Dead Last.

 

Like he needed the constant reminder that he had only barely graduated the academy.

 

Oddly enough, as he desperately dodged or blocked the kunai being hurled at him, he had a flash of Eru Lee, or rather, her clone, on the bridge, and that strange smile that she had never offered him in person.

 

He could see himself back there on that bridge, on that peaceful morning, as if it had only happened a moment ago.

 

“Maybe I’m just not meant to be a ninja,” he’d said as he’d looked out at the water and the sunlight glinting off it, “Maybe I was supposed to be a merchant or ramen chef or anything but a shinobi. I mean, it wasn’t like I didn’t know I wasn’t talented. I just thought, maybe if I tried hard enough or worked at it enough, I could be better and…”

 

Only this time, the Eru Lee of his imagination, a softer and more patient thing, said, “You know, Haru, there’s no shame in surrender.”

 

She smiled at him then, that strange rather un-Lee like smile that she’d given to him back then, “To know your own limitations is a kind of strength, I think, and perhaps in this situation recognizing your own limits is the most honorable path you can take. You’ve kept with your team this far, now though, you aren’t holding any of them back and can think of what’s best for your own career.”

 

Then, finally, “After all, haven’t you already exceeded your own expectations? Haven’t you made it to the final round of the exams without injury? You can still stop while you’re ahead, and remember, that there will be other years, and that most take the chunin exams more than once.”

 

The scene faded, and reality reasserted itself as the epiphany drew down upon him, that yes, there wasn’t any shame in admitting he couldn’t do it, or at least, not now. Maybe when he got these eyes under control, when he was out from Lee or Minato’s shadow then maybe he’d have a real chance of becoming a chunin.

 

Just not here and now, but that was fine, and there was no shame in admitting it.

 

He opened his mouth, took a breath…

 

“I surrender!”

 

He hadn’t said it. He felt his mouth fall further open in shock, trying and failing to come to grips with what had just happened, what must have happened, that the Kiri genin had somehow surrendered before he had.

 

From the Konoha section of the stands above him, where the other chunin hopefuls prepared for their own battles, he could hear Lee breaking out into hysterical laughter even as a quiet murmur went up through the crowds.

 

For a surreal moment, Haru was able to view himself from the outside in, that is, he was able to recognize just what he looked like right now. A few months ago, he was perfectly ordinary. Brown hair, brown eyes, average skin tone, average height, and less than average abilities, in other words in no way remarkable or remotely threatening. Now though, with white hair, sunglasses, his own flickering eyes, and his proximity to Minato and Lee he probably looked downright terrifying and like he had a wealth of secret blood limits honed in Konoha for generations. A stray offshoot of the Uzumaki clan. Likely, this poor bastard, due to the trauma of being pummeled by an impatient and concussion suffering Lee, probably didn’t even remember that Haru hadn’t put up a fight.

 

Or, maybe he had, but it’d made it seem like Haru was the final boss or something, like he was so much more dangerous than Lee, Minato, or Uzumaki that he didn’t even bother to take part. Had instead amused himself with solitaire while his lesser minions did his work for him.

 

Or, and here was a strangely nauseating thought, somehow Kiri’s dead last was worse than Konoha’s. In other words, Dead Last had just been in a face-off with Dead Last Two: Electric Boogaloo.

 

Either way, distantly he heard himself announced the victor, and in a daze found himself ascending from the arena and back to where his teammates and an assortment of other genin were all waiting for him.

 

“Nice job winning by default, Dead Last!” Lee said, slapping him across the back with a large grin, probably feeling like she was being incredibly supportive. Which, for her, she was, he was honestly surprised she wasn’t still rolling on the ground in laughter.

 

“What the hell just happened?” Haru asked and judging by the look on everyone else’s face they were all wondering the same thing.

 

“Well,” Minato started, looking Haru up and down with a musing expression as he tried to put it together, “I think you psychologically terrified your opponent, by avoiding all of his early hits, and not making any overt moves in the beginning besides that one where you landed a hit, along with what happened in the second task, you seemed much more… menacing than usual. Likely, they mistook you for being at my or Lee’s level.”

 

Minato offered him a rather apologetic and sympathetic smile and shrug as Haru just stared blankly at him. Well, wasn’t that just wonderful.

 

“If it makes you feel better,” Minato added with a more cheerful smile, bashfully rubbing the back of his head, “You’ll probably lose next time.”

 

And that was even worse. Why was it, that he always felt like the gods were somewhere up there, laughing at him? Probably because Lee, right there in plain sight on the ground, was still desperately stifling giggles even as Minato elbowed her in the ribs to force her into politeness.

 

* * *

 

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Jiraiya said, “He pulled it off.”

 

Jiraiya didn’t want to say he couldn’t believe it, but, well, about five fights later and he still couldn’t believe it, and judging from Haru’s expression as he cheered on his comrades he couldn’t either. Against all odds, Haru had somehow progressed to the next round…

 

He wondered if Tsunade, somewhere in Konoha, had made a bet with someone and how much money she had just lost.

 

* * *

 

“Alright! In your face Namikaze, Uzumaki Kushina is on her way to victory, believe it!” Kushina grinned as she stepped up from the arena, victorious in her fight against the older Aurubame heir and…

 

Well, it’d actually been eerily anticlimactic. She’d just kind of stood there while he’d covered her with his weird bugs and she’d set up explosive seals, then before she could even really set any of them off he’d surrendered saying something about too much chakra and how it was pointless to keep going.

 

She’d sort of been looking forward to a more impressive fight, this just felt… sad. She spared a sheepish grin towards the older boy, but he was as stoic as ever as he silently walked past her and towards his own teammates, apparently not bothered at all that he’d surrendered to the glory that was Uzumaki Kushina.

 

Which, well, good for him she guessed.

 

Hopefully, it would mean that she and Minato were actually paired up next time and she’d have a real chance to show him what Uzumakis were made of.

 

Kushina for her own part, made her way to her pretty much adopted team of team seven as well as Mikoto who grinned up with her and offered a cheerful thumbs-up. Ready to come over to celebrate Kushina’s victory as soon as she was done trash talking.

 

“Congratulations, Kushina, try not to let your victory go to your head,” Minato dully droned out, looking anything but pleased by her winning, which somehow made him look almost adorable.

 

Oh, she would enjoy crushing him and rubbing his unnaturally pretty face in the dirt.

 

“Oh, believe me, that’s just one fight down and one step closer to me winning the tournament and becoming hokage!” Kushina grinned with even more confidence than she actually felt, which was impressive, because she was brimming with confidence right now, “And one step closer to you getting your ass handed to you on your path to becoming my secretary.”

 

“If you say so,” Minato said in that same rather terse manner before stopping, lifting his head as Mikoto and her grumpy cousin Fugaku were announced to face off next. Mikoto’s eyes dimmed, a hardened expression appeared on her face, and she offered Kushina a small wave and a ‘we’ll talk later’ hand signal as Kushina saluted her future victory, watching as both she and Uchiha Fugaku walked down into the arena below them.

 

“Wow, Uchiha against Uchiha,” Kushina noted quietly, “That feels kind of wrong, I mean, that it’s taking place this early.”

 

“Well, it’s supposed to be randomized,” Lee said with a small shrug leaning against the railing separating them from the arena as she looked down on the two dark-haired genin, “So I guess there’s always a chance, and we have to face each other sometime.”

 

“Still, that means one of them’s not going to be in the next round,” Kushina said, and, she didn’t know too much about the weird politics of Mikoto’s clan, but that didn’t seem like it’d be a great idea. Mikoto was always a little tense about her family, especially Fugaku who she was technically engaged to.

 

Fugaku, who by marrying her, would end up clan head someday.

 

“Wait a minute, you two are next, right? Or coming up, anyway,” Kushina said suddenly, looking at Minato and Lee, before Mikoto and Fugaku could start, “That means we’re almost done, who’s still left?”

 

Lee and Minato looked at eachother then their companions but before either of them could respond Haru answered.

 

“There’s me, of course,” Haru started in, still looking oddly depressed over his victory, you think the guy would have preferred losing or something, “Then there’s that blonde Suna nin that we faced in the second test, the red-head Suna nin who looks just as terrifying.”

 

He then motioned over towards Shikaku, Inoichi, and Chozu who were now moving towards the railing to watch the fight as well as the rest of Konoha’s chunin hopefuls, “Ino, Shika, Cho, the Hyuga twins, you, and then whoever wins this fight, along with whoever wins in Minato or Lee’s fight.”

 

“So, basically everyone who knows your dirty secret of being Dead Last,” Lee pointed out, rather untactfully.

“Yes, Lee, basically that,” Haru responded with a sigh.

 

Kushina however didn’t pay this much mind, instead she watched as Fugaku and Mikoto started. Both were very fast, and both activated their sharingans right away, Mikoto’s markedly different even at a distance, but even in the beginning Mikoto seemed to read Fugaku better than he did her, and it was clear that she was pulling ahead of him…

 

Something that the clan probably would never have predicted, or wanted to predict. Because if Mikoto was just supposed to be the wife of the clan head, rather than the clan heir herself, what did it mean for the clan that their future chosen clan head would lose to her?

What would that mean for Mikoto? Because somehow, even as Fugaku began to flag and Mikoto moved in for the kill, she didn’t think Mikoto was supposed to win this fight. And that perhaps, it would have been better for Mikoto, if she and Fugaku had never directly fought one another.

 

Kushina would have to talk to her, probably when they were back in Konoha, but all the same…

 

“Well, that was quick and anticlimactic,” Lee noted as Mikoto was named victor, “That was almost as fast as your anticlimactic fight, Dead Last.”

 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Haru asked but Lee didn’t seem to pay much mind to this.

 

“I guess it makes sense though,” Lee said musingly, “If you think about it.”

 

“What makes sense?” Kushina asked but Minato and Lee simply looked at each other then back at Kushina, before Minato gave a cheery grin and an explanation of, “Oh, nothing, just blood limit nonsense.”

 

The sharingan? Mikoto had said something about having a more advanced sharingan for whatever reason but she hadn’t really explained it to Kushina. Which, made sense, as that was clan business… She wondered if and how Minato and Lee would know more about it than she would. As far as she knew Mikoto barely talked to the pair of them without Kushina.

 

Then again, there was that strange episode Mikoto had recounted about Lee bulldozing her way through the compound and to their daycare, although maybe that was about something else.

 

They all looked up as Minato’s name and that of an unfamiliar Suna genin was announced, Minato’s eyes drifted to the other side where he caught the gaze of a terrified looking boy, “Oh, well, if it isn’t our old friend from the second part of the exam.”

 

“Is that the short blonde kid’s useless teammate?” Lee asked, leaning over the railing to get a look at the boy descending down into the arena, Minato cracking his knuckles and grinning, “Yes, Lee, yes, it is. Oh, this will be fun I think.”

 

Without further ado Minato hopped down onto the steps and then down into the arena itself, looking like he didn’t have a care in the world, which somehow made the other boy look that much more terrified.

 

“Geez, and he tells me I have too much confidence,” Kushina noted but neither Lee nor Haru seemed to pay her much mind. Strange, she didn’t think she liked the feeling of being overlooked so easily, by either of them.

 

Well, by anyone, really, that was half of why she was always so loud and boisterous, deep inside Kushina was a fear of fading in everyone’s memories, of being passed over…

 

“Oh, don’t worry, Minato’s going to eat that boy alive,” Lee said with the strange overwhelming faith that she always seemed to have in Minato, “For the honor and glory of Konoha, of course.”

 

And he did, in short order too, not even having to use anything other than taijutsu and knocking the boy out cold in only a few hits. A truly anticlimactic fight if there was one, not that he seemed to mind, the way he exited the arena and grinned at Lee. And for a moment, just a moment, Kushina wondered if she had ever given him enough credit publicly or privately.

 

Because surely, even if it was only to herself, she could admit that there had always been something about Namikaze Minato.

 

* * *

 

“Hokage, just what are you playing at?”

 

Hiruzen had expected this ages ago, really, that the sandaime kazekage and the sandaime mizukage had chosen only to approach him now spoke of their restraint or perhaps their own caution and bafflement.

 

The kazekage was a notoriously shrewd man, the most powerful and inventive kage that Suna had seen thus far, someone who could probably give Hiruzen a run for his money if push came to shove. He’d probably had a heart attack when he saw Eru Lee not only manipulating sand, as per his own techniques, but perfecting it to a degree that had taken him decades to master. Hiruzen could only imagine the look on his face when Lee obliterated his labyrinth and then, with a few patently incorrect hand seals, rebuilt it.

 

The mizukage was slightly less notorious, he paled in comparison to his eccentric predecessor and his control over his own village was dubious at best, especially in the wake of their near pyrrhic victory with the destruction of Uzushio. They had lost many good ninja in that fight, perhaps too many, for them to have considered it worth obliterating Konoha’s sister village. Likely, the man had been hoping to fill the ranks quickly and that this new generation would be crucial to that. That this didn’t appear to be Kiri’s year was just his luck, that Konoha’s team seven had obliterated every genin he’d entered without breaking was devastating.

 

Of course, they did not yet realize that this was par for the course when it came to Eru Lee. There was a reason he had a filing cabinet dedicated to her. 

 

Still, during the first and second portions of the exams each kage had kept mostly to his own section, evaluating each genin team’s performance with the various jonins accompanying him, only now did they sit together in a box dedicated to the kages as they watched over the beginnings of this final phase.

 

Of course, at the moment Hiruzen was the only one who had the decency to watch. Perhaps some of this was warrented, the overwhelming majority left were Konoha genin, but all the same, the mizukage could at least spare a glance for a few of his brats after he’d whined about the results of the labyrinth.

 

Not that it mattered anyway, as all but one of them had been eliminated, and Eru Lee’s victory over her Kiri nin opponent was a foregone conclusion. Still, it was in the spirit of the thing, forgoing watching your own shinobi just for the sake of village gossip could not be good for morale.

 

That was what spies were for.

 

Although, in a way, this was the first real chance they had to confront the sandaime hokage on just what the hell was going on in Konoha these days. Likely, with rumors of the shodaime and nidaime hokages’ resurrections, they had been anticipating this moment long before they’d caught sight of Eru Lee.

 

Hiruzen, for his own part, merely sighed and lit the end of his pipe with a small flame, that girl caused him far too much trouble, “The same as you, I imagine, evaluating the future chunin of my village.”

 

Both the mizukage and kazekage looked rather irritated by this response. There was a tension about them too, the war had ended not so long ago, likely it pressed on their minds just as much as it did Hiruzen how new and fresh these treaties between them were.

 

“Future chunin, is that what you call it?” the mizukage asked, “You do realize none of us are impressed by your throwing a pint-sized jonin in here for show.”

 

“I assure you,” Hiruzen said with a wry smile, “Eru Lee is anything but a jonin.”

 

In fact, the very fact that she was merely a genin, and had only been one for a year now, was rather embarrassing.

 

“She could be a kage,” the kazekage noted, and he did not mince words. To Lee’s minimal credit she appeared to have tried to act the part of a normal genin, at least, until she’d gone and gotten concussed. Even then, within the walls of Konoha or on a mission, she was notorious for being far more blatant with her S-ranked techniques. No, the sad truth was, Eru Lee was undoubtedly of the belief that she was being perfectly subtle.

 

“Perhaps, but then, there’s more to being a kage than raw power,” Hiruzen noted, but not expanding more than that, leaving it to their imagination to supply just what it was that Eru Lee lacked that she was only a genin.

 

Undoubtedly, in some other village, she would have been pushed well beyond her ranks. Even in Konoha, had she been a little older during the height of the second war, she would have likely found herself in a higher position of command long before she was emotionally ready. However, Hiruzen did not believe in such measures when they were not necessary, a trait he did not share with many of his fellow kages.

 

Likely, they found such ideology soft hearted at best and beyond foolish at worst.

 

With a sigh Hiruzen explained further, “There are good years and there are bad years, this is not a new pattern for hidden villages. And Konoha, for whatever reason, has had a very good year.”

 

The mizukage, next to him, ground his teeth in irritation, undoubtedly thinking of his own lackluster year while the kazekage just stoically took in Hiruzen’s words.

 

“Perhaps, instead of worrying about the abilities of one genin, we can take this as a sign of the strength of our alliance with one another and the benefits it will bring each of our villages in years to come.”

 

Hiruzen didn’t bother to state the unspoken threat, that to cross Konoha now, or in the coming decade, would be a very poor idea indeed. If Eru Lee was going to be blatant he could allow himself the luxury of using it to his own advantage.

 

Not to mention the unspoken, unacknowledged, truth of the shodaime and nidaime hokages’ resurrections. A truth that, apparently, not even the kages were willing to breech at the moment, trusting instead intelligence brought to them by their spies.

 

When in doubt, a shinobi would almost always resort to subtlety, which, for the moment, was fine with Hiruzen.

 

For now, they all watched, riveted, as the red headed Eru Lee entered the arena below them, a rather put-upon expression on her face as she approached her quaking opponent. They stared at each other for a few moments, waiting for the referee’s signal, and as soon as the flag was thrown a pillar of sand rose up from the earth and shoved her opponent into a wall where he twitched there as he fell unconscious.

 

She waited for a few polite seconds as the stunned referee declared it a match, then walked back up the stairs, hands shoved into her pockets looking as if she was contemplating her next meal.

 

Very likely daydreaming of ramen.

 

* * *

 

On stepping out of the arena, turning to Minato, Lee asked, “Is it just me, or was all of that very anticlimactic?”


	22. Never Start a Land War In Asia

_In which Jiraiya has a furious internal debate with himself due to his own carelessness as well as the oddly high-pressure scenario he has found himself in, Lee supports inter-village bonding much to Minato’s disgruntlement, and Minato goes through a Rocky IV worthy 80’s style training montage that is mostly off-screen._

 

* * *

 

It was a strange thing, using another village’s training fields, something that felt alien even two weeks after the first round of the tournament had ended. Jiraiya had never had that chance, the first shinobi war had lingered on into Jiraiya’s adolescence, eventually putting the hat onto Sarutobi-sensei’s head, and so the chunin exams (a relatively new thing even then) had all taken place within the village.

 

The next time he’d really get to see another country in depth was during the second war.

 

Now, Konoha did have its fair share of nasty training fields, the Forest of Death had its name for a reason, and one got their fair share of nearly all the elements, learned how to blend in with the shadows the trees made, and how to spot an enemy ninja among the foliage.

 

However, Jiraiya had to say, that Suna’s desert was something else altogether.

 

If the dense woods of Konoha could make a foreigner feel claustrophobic, Suna was the opposite, there was no natural cover here, no convenient place to fade back into the shadows, and instead in every direction you were visible in this harsh yellow sea that took no pity on a traveler.

 

Although, perhaps, what had been adding to this quiet unease that Jiraiya had been feeling for weeks on end, this eerie agoraphobia, was the fact that they were being spied on constantly by ANBU agents. Well, Suna’s ANBU, Kiri probably whatever jonin could spare for a few moments as the only ANBU they brought was probably exclusively to guard the kage or do more important shit than spy on Jiraiya and his gaggle of twelve-year-olds.

 

Point being, as soon as that last round had ended, every single day they went out to whatever training field they were so graciously allotted, there were at least two well concealed chakra signatures lingering nearby.

 

No visible sign of either of them (although sometimes, if it was a poor Kiri bastard), there’d be a haze of mist lingering in the sunlight (less conspicuous than a puddle, Jiraiya supposed), but oh yes, they were there.

 

And then there were those bastards who didn’t even try to be subtle.

 

Like the honorable Chiyo. Now, maybe it was just Jiraiya guessing, but he was starting to believe she was doing it more to mess with his head than learn anything about Lee. All the same, every once in a while, she’d just show up out of goddamn nowhere and grin at his kids while casually asking how the training’s going.

 

And Jiraiya would, politely and in the spirit of inner-village cooperation, tell her to get the hell out and go be a terrifying old lady elsewhere.

 

This always seemed to amuse her.

 

Plus, you had Konoha nin dropping in every now and then, much less covertly, making pleasant small talk with Jiraiya all while casually looking over at Minato or Lee, no doubt trying to get some idea of how to prepare their kids to fight them or else just to see what all the fuss was about.

 

In other words, for the past two weeks, Jiraiya felt like the belle of the ball or like the prettiest Uchiha in the academy… He didn’t like it.

 

Well, more than that, he thought with a sigh, with so many people around, and more, just being outside of Konoha in general, Jiraiya felt like he couldn’t really get into half of what he normally would have wanted to.

 

Well, he’d been helpful to Haru and Minato.

 

Minato had gotten further in fuinjutsu as well as futon jutsus, eerily far, now that Jiraiya thought about it. That kid was training like a madman for the next round of the tournament, likely with the goal in mind of publicly humiliating Uzumaki Kushina, and as a result had gone far past basic seals and futon jutsus into some pretty nasty stuff. Which, good on Minato, Jiraiya supposed, except he’d never seen Minato that, well, terrifying before.

 

Normally Minato, while ambitious and talented, was relatively easy going and could be counted upon to be the voice of reason to the Minato and Lee duo. However, apparently, when it came to Uzumaki, all bets were off.

 

As for Haru, he was given the vital task of getting those goddamn eyes under control before he even thought of doing anything else. As a result, it had been somewhat slow going, but at least he was making some progress in a goal with a direction that was vital to his future as a shinobi, even if it wasn’t particularly glamorous.

 

No, the problem tadpole, as always, was none other than Eru Lee.

 

Lee, he had pretty much doing garbage. Well, not garbage, her taijutsu (while actually pretty good at this point after it had been pounded into her head for a year) was still nowhere near her god like abilities in genjutsu and ninjutsu and thus could always use some work. And, being a taijutsu specialist himself, Jiraiya was of the belief that it was never a bad idea to work on your katas and refine your hand to hand combat.

 

Still, all the same, doing two weeks’ worth of intensive katas in the desert, for hours on end, without interruption of team exercises, looked like it was pounding her soul into dust, and Jiraiya interrupting this by testing how long she could go sleep deprived or having her go on runs in the desert wasn’t exactly improving her morale.

 

He felt for her, he really did, but unfortunately there wasn’t much they could do about it. Team exercises were just too risky unless he limited her strictly to taijutsu (in which case all their foreign spy friends would start wondering why Lee was never allowed to use ninjutsu even in complex scenarios), and even if she tried to fake normal jutsus Jiraiya did not count on her remembering any of the hand seals or even performing a normal talented genin level jutsu.

 

As a result, Lee constantly working on her taijutsu and stamina was really the only way to make her look like a normal goddamn human being in front of their audience. Even if they already assumed she was next in line for the hat off ability alone.

 

(And what a horrible thought that was, Eru Lee, yondaime hokage, Jiraiya might not want the hat himself with a furious desperation but if Lee somehow ended up being the other option…)

 

Still, on this fine sunny and sandy morning, feeling himself getting actively tan as he watched the kids go at it, the past two weeks of whatever they’d been doing (or rather, what he’d been putting Lee through) weren’t really what was bothering him. Well, not specifically.

 

Today, Jiraiya had realized that he’d been very stupid and that now he was paying the consequences for it.

 

Back in Konoha, in preparation for the exams, when he’d been trying and failing to coach Lee into an approximation of a normal human being, Haru into something that wouldn’t die in the first round of the exams, and focusing on honing Minato’s abilities, he’d ended up testing Minato’s elemental affinity.

 

It’d been the right time to do it, Minato had been more than ready for basic elemental jutsus, and with a clear answer towards wind Jiraiya hadn’t thought too much past it other than starting on some C-ranked jutsus for the kid.

 

It’d seemed like a good foundation to lay to get a direction for where Minato’s apprenticeship with Jiraiya should go once the exams wrapped up.

 

Like a complete dumbass he’d forgotten to test Lee or Haru.

 

Now, normally, and probably for the other teams, even the ones without kids in the next rounds, this was the perfect opportunity to do that. Elemental jutsus could be tricky, and might take a long time to master, a good project to get done in the month they had until the next round.

 

And normally Jiraiya wouldn’t even care, he’d just go ahead and do it, because sure while some sneaky bastard of a jonin sensei or genin might be watching to try to figure out what someone’s affinity was and how to best work against it, it wasn’t like it was a dirty secret. It usually wasn’t something you could or wanted to keep a dirty secret, out in the field, you were going to use your best jutsus, regardless of what it gave away, very few could afford not to.

 

Except, in Jiraiya’s case, at least with his students, there might be a dirty secret lurking among them. Because while he knew Minato’s element already, and it’d be good for Haru to know and he expected no real issues there, he had no idea what the hell would happen when Lee’s hand touched the paper.

 

So now Jiraiya was staring at his kids, like he’d been doing all morning, while inside him reasonable Jiraiya tried to argue with paranoid team seven conspiracy theorist Jiraiya.

 

Reasonable Jiraiya started by saying, that, hey, even though Lee can do alarming shit like raising the dead and even rising from the dead she just has some bizarre and scary blood limits. Look at the Uchiha, their blood limit is bizarre and scary too, and they still have normal elemental affinities like normal people.

 

Paranoid team seven conspiracy theorist Jiraiya retorted by pointing out that Lee might just look conveniently human and, more, that every time he’d tried to set some standard of normalcy for Lee she’d gone and blown it out of the water. Lee couldn’t even make an academy clone, or even a shadow clone, she’d gone way beyond a forbidden Konoha technique before she’d even graduated!

 

Reasonable Jiraiya shrugged and said, well raging paranoid team seven conspiracy theorist Jiraiya, you have an admirable point. However, despite being sometimes as thick as a brick wall and more powerful than a jinchuuriki, if Lee is an alien or whatever she plays her role admirably well and I’m willing to bet that even Lee can’t Leeify her own elemental affinity.

 

Paranoid team seven conspiracy theorist Jiraiya balked, laughing out at the foolishness of reasonable Jiraiya. He then asked if reasonable Jiraiya wanted to bet that Lee’s element was something ridiculous like black hole, or time and space, or even just all the elements at the same time.

 

Reasonable Jiraiya then got somewhat annoyed and pointed out that he didn’t need that kind of pessimism as he already had enough troubles as it was.

 

Paranoid team seven conspiracy theorist Jiraiya took a strangely reasonable path as he pointed out that, hey, Jiraiya, you don’t have to do this here and now in a foreign technically allied village. You could just wait til you get back to Konoha like someone who’s not a jackass.

 

Reasonable Jiraiya then reminded him that the chances of Lee not being promoted after all of this were virtually zero, and Hatake Sakumo would no doubt be giving him quite the look and judge him forever if Lee came in with absolutely zero idea what her elemental affinity was. And if there was someone you didn’t want to give you funny looks it was Hatake Sakumo. Because, in his own way, that guy was just as terrifying as Chiyo of Sunagakure.

 

And this was about the point that Jiraiya realized he was sounding crazy even to himself and he’d better stop now and just come to a decision already. His eyes drifted towards Lee, moving through her katas with a diligence that frankly impressed him.

 

Screw it, he thought to himself, if Lee looked and acted this much like a human being then some part of her just had to function like one.

 

“Hey, kids, we’re going to take a break for a minute, there’s something I want to talk to you about,” Jiraiya said, calling them over, much to the relief of both Lee and Haru who both in their own way had been struggling for the past few hours.

 

“What is it, sensei?” Minato asked as he jogged up, storing half finished seals in one of the scrolls strapped to his waist.

 

“Well, Minato, I’ve already gone over this with you but what do the rest of you know about elemental affinities?” Jiraiya paused, waited, looked to both Haru and Lee who both looked at him somewhat blankly, “Not all at once, brats.”

 

“Alright, your chakra, aside from being yours is aligned with one sometimes two different elements. This means that jutsus of your element will be easier for you to perform while jutsus of your opposing element will be the hardest,” both of them seemed to be silently following along as Jiraiya then went onto say, “Now, the test for your primary element is a rather simple one, and I figured since I’ve tested for Minato’s already I should get around to you two.”

 

With that, from his own storage scroll Jiraiya put a single glove on then pulled out two different sheets of chakra paper, “This is chakra paper, touch this and, depending what happens, we’ll know what your element is.”

 

Lee reached out and before she could even think about touching one of the pieces of paper Jiraiya caught her hand with a rather awkward grin, “Right, Lee, let’s let Haru go first.”

 

Lee raised her eyebrows somewhat then shrugged, watching as Haru silently, readjusting the sunglasses as he went, touched the paper and watched as it slowly, but surely, caught fire and started to crumble.

 

Well, the kid was extremely low on chakra at the moment.

 

“Right, Haru, that means fire’s your affinity, most of Konoha shinobi have fire as their element so you’ll be in good company,” Jiraiya noted, which was probably a good thing for him, as that meant he could pick up rather common jutsus created by fellow Konoha nin, there were a lot of resources around for fire jutsus.

 

Haru did not look thrilled by this statement, instead he watched as the paper slowly, oh so slowly, began to burn away into nothing. Jiriaya tried not to wince, because in its own way, that paper was saying more than it ever should about the state of Haru’s chakra.

 

That probably was his cue to move on.

 

“Right, Lee, I… guess it’s time for us to test yours,” Jiraiya said slowly, almost wincing, watching as Lee’s pale hand descended in the moment of truth, knowing that everyone was watching from the shadows just waiting to see what happened.

 

Her fingers brushed against the paper, he could almost feel a crackle of energy, of pure chakra in the air, and he looked down as… Nothing happened. He blinked, but no, her hand was now firmly on the paper and it wasn’t doing anything.

 

No splitting in half, no crackling with electricity, no raging inferno, no flood of water, no crumbling into earth, absolutely nothing.

 

What the hell, he thought to himself in stunned amazement, was that even supposed to mean? Did that mean that Lee… just didn’t have an affinity? Or was it just something that chakra paper couldn’t identify?

 

And what did that even make Lee, everyone’s chakra had some affinity to it!

 

Before he could even say anything though Haru’s hand accidentally slipped against the paper, causing it to slowly, but surely, catch fire.

 

Well, Jiraiya wasn’t going to waste that opportunity with his audience still lurking about unseen in the dunes, “Oh, look at that, Lee, you have a fire affinity too. Congratulations.”

 

None of them said anything, instead they watched, as the piece of paper, slowly, ever so slowly and anticlimactically, burned into ash. Probably convincing no one that was watching it that this was the result of Lee’s unwieldly chakra.

 

And just like that, it was another team seven day in Suna, waiting for the next round of the tournament to finally start. Needless to say, Jiraiya really couldn’t wait to be out of this place.

 

* * *

 

“I’m dying,” Haru said, breathing out and staring at the desert which seemed to stretch out in any and every direction.

 

It was official, Haru had hit his limit, again, doing absolutely nothing, again. He sighed, feeling himself burning even under layers of sunscreen, wondering just what he’d done to deserve this. Well, he’d eaten a giant mystery peach, but he still argued that he hadn’t had much of a choice at that point.

 

When you were kidnapped and almost killed by Lee’s sharingan wielding rogue emotionally supportive clone, who you’d previously watched drawn herself to death in a river, you only had so many options, and, at the time, eating the peach had seemed akin to defying the fickle and indifferent gods that oversaw his life.

 

Still, that didn’t mean he didn’t regret doing it every single day since.

 

“Why are you dying?” Lee asked, stopping beside him as she slowed from her latest lap around the village, chugging down water and somehow having the indecency to not be sunburnt despite her unbelievably pale coloring, “You haven’t even done anything. All I’ve seen you do is sit there for two and a half weeks and try to meditate your fancy swirly eyes into submission.”

 

“I know,” he responded rather flatly, he hardly needed reminders, “That doesn’t mean I’m not dying though.”

 

It was hard to believe that he’d gone a step down from trying to walk up trees, but he really had, now his latest and greatest goal was to somehow turn off his eyes. And somehow, despite how intuitive it should be, it was proving just as hard as walking up that tree.

 

Jiraiya at least had given the encouraging news that it should be possible, since they were flickering that meant that they should have an off stage, if they’d only been able to be active they would have been stuck that way from the beginning (a side effect that supposedly came with stolen dojutsus).

 

Which just meant that Haru was incompetent in not having been able to turn them off completely since that mission.

 

“I thought you’d save dying for the next fight, dying while just sitting there is just kind of sad, Dead Last” Lee stated, blinking against the sunlight even as she talked to him, and great he hadn’t even really been thinking about that for once in his life (and now he couldn’t stop thinking about it, because any way you went about it Haru was in for a world of pain in the next round). Then with a sigh, Lee wiped the sweat from her brow and announced, “Well, I know I’m tired of running in circles… I think Jiraiya-sensei’s run out of ideas.”

 

That was… probably true, especially since Jiraiya did look kind of apologetic and awkward whenever he happened to look in Lee’s direction, making time to correct her on her katas and stances and general taijutsu technique when he wasn’t having her running laps or doing squats or handstands.

 

Even now as Jiraiya glanced over towards them from where he was standing next to Minato, he offered them a somewhat awkward grimace, a wave, and a vague hand gesture that meant something along the lines of, “I’m coming over in a minute, sit tight.”

 

Which, Haru could easily do that, he’d been sitting tight for ages. Of course, he’d also been given the instruction to try to feel his chakra and then limit the amount that travelled to his eyes but that had been… Harder than it sounded.

 

Except what did that even mean, feeling your chakra? He’d never gotten that, probably part of the reason he’d never really gotten leaves to stick to his body and had only barely managed to get up a tree.

 

He sighed, his eyes drifting over to Jiraiya and Minato, watching as they faded in and out of focus with the wonderful eyes he still couldn’t control.

 

“At least Minato’s having fun,” Haru drily noted, not that fun was exactly the right word for it, no Lee had given the surprisingly apt term only a few days after the first round of the tournamnet, Minato was rage training.

 

Even now, as he determinedly whipped through newly learned futon jutsus, one even looking like it might be a B-rank jutsu and not just the C-rank versions he’d been honing for the past month, with a surprising amount of efficiency and sheer raw power, there was an air of offended determination to him that was starting to border on ridiculous.

 

Especially for Minato, who, without Lee involved, usually was the exact opposite of ridiculous.

 

“Yes, Uzumaki, I think, should be more worried than she is,” Lee returned in a musing sort of tone as she tilted her head and eyed Minato’s progress.

 

“Please, this is everything Uzumaki Kushina has ever wanted,” Haru responded rather dismissively, which was true enough, Kushina had likely been waiting for this day since she was a ten-year-old immigrant from Uzushio, only newly arrived in Konoha and already declaring herself the future hokage.

 

Haru had only been glad at the time that no one really paid any attention to Dead Last.

 

“It’s what she thinks she wants, certainly,” Lee hummed in agreement, a far off look in her eyes that seemed older than she had any right to be, “But getting it and thinking you want something are two entirely different things.”

 

“You think Minato’s going to beat her?” Haru asked, which, he would have assumed yes just because Lee was Minato’s eerie cheerleader, and for her to cast doubt on his abilities just seemed wrong. However, that said, Lee usually was fairly blunt and didn’t hedge her opinions, so it’d be unlike her to outright lie if she thought Uzumaki had a shot.

 

“I haven’t seen Uzumaki Kushina in action, at least, not outside of the few times here and there, but Minato is and always has been very good, more he wants it, much more than Uzumaki does no matter what she has to say about it. I think he wants to rub Uzumaki’s fate into the dirt more than he’s wanted anything in his entire life,” Lee said, watching as Minato sent a sand dune flying in every direction, away from the blast of wind he had sent towards it, “Either way, it’s going to be brutal.”

 

Then, looking down at Haru and seeing his likely bewildered expression, Lee noted, “This has been a long time coming, I think. Even Minato, the politest and most patient of us all, has his limits.”

 

Haru, watching Minato, couldn’t help but agree and wondered if it said something about him that he could now sit here and agree with Lee of all people on… well… anything. Not the point where it was like her clone had been, but all the same, there was something… Too weird about this.

 

He sighed again, tried to focus on his eyes, on the trickle of… something, energy, flowing towards them, ebbing in and out as they flickered on and off. And then, then, he felt it, or something like it, and drew it backwards.

 

And… And for a blessed half-afraid moment he sat there, with his eyes closed, daring to believe that, yes, that this time it had…

 

He opened his eyes.

 

He blinked, blinked again, everything not… Well… not in focus, not in the clear ultra-focus that was the rinnegan, but goddammit he could see again! He opened his mouth, grinned, held up his hands, “I think I’ve got it!”

 

He laughed out loud, tore off his sunglasses with a victorious cry, moving in towards Lee, “Have I got it? Are they really normal?”

 

“They’re black now, if that’s what you mean,” Lee said and then Haru was off, victoriously dancing towards his sensei with a great cry of joy and the feeling of energy not being drained out through his eyeballs, “Jiraiya-sensei, I think I’ve got it! I think I finally got it!”

 

However, his victorious bounding towards Jiraiya was cut short as he accidentally ran into Minato’s kick, sending him flying into a nearby sand dune where he wheezed, breathed in sand, and then spent the next ten minutes feeling like he was choking as he tried to cough it all out of his lungs while Minato apologized profusely, Jiraiya sort of grimaced down at him as he tried to congratulate him for his rather minimal accomplishment, and Lee returned to running laps and pretending she wasn’t in any way associated with Haru.

 

And so, Haru realized as he finally sat up, that even if he had working eyes, he was still very much Dead Last and probably always would be. He should probably just resign himself to it already.

 

* * *

 

The end of their training period seemed to hit them in no time at all even while it also seemed to have lasted forever. Soon enough though, it was the day before the next round of the tournament, and with that in mind Minato had given into Lee’s insisting that they take a break and search for some reasonably priced restaurant.

 

Which, apparently, in Suna, just didn’t exist, at least, not for foreign shinobi.

 

Minato supposed it made sense, they had to import just about everything, even water, as such the taxes on anything in the village were stupendously high and frankly far outside of Lee and Minato’s price range. If they didn’t have a stipend for attending the chunin exams, then Minato wasn’t sure they’d be able to afford even minimal groceries here.

 

Suna itself was an interesting place, different from Konoha. The civilians here seemed much harder, for one thing, always glaring at the foreign ninja walking through their streets. As for the shinobi themselves, they tended not to run into them too much.

 

Well, Lee ran into them, or more accurately, they appeared to run into Lee every now and then, but Minato suspected that was more political than it was sociable. Especially given the way Jiraiya-sensei’s hackles always seemed to rise when any of them, especially the honorable Chiyo, stepped foot near them, asking Lee all about her jutsus and hand seals which Lee deflected with her usual complete and utter indifference to such technicalities.

 

(Which of course, seemed to make the Suna and Kira nin even that much more confused, all of them leaving with a sort of dazed expression as Jiraiya booted them from whatever training ground they happened to be in that day.)

 

Otherwise they appeared to stick to themselves, eyeing the Konoha and Kiri nin somewhat warily but not giving them any real trouble but making no overtly friendly moves either.

 

Even a month after their arrival there was still palpable tension in the air.

 

However, even now, Minato wasn’t really thinking about that, or the food that was out of their price range for that matter. Instead, there was that single insistent thought, the one that had been driving him for nearly a month now, the idea that Namikaze Minato had had it.

 

He had had enough.

 

And for once, it was Minato who was starting a conversation with a rather Lee-like declaration as he confessed, out of context, for anyone and everyone to hear that, “Lee, I’ve reached my limit.”

 

Lee raised her eyebrows slightly, nodded to herself, and it said more than enough that she didn’t even have to ask for context as she said (in a rather Minato-like manner herself), “You know, I think I noticed that.”

 

Minato however continued as if she hadn’t said anything, calmly and clearly declaring, “I have had enough of Uzumaki Kushina and I can’t take any more of it.”

 

It had been years, three years now, of constant verbal and even physical abuse that seemed to have originated from nowhere. Every single time she’d ever seen him, from the very beginning, from the first second they’d met, perhaps even before he’d opened his mouth to introduce himself, he’d been called in no short order, flakey, girly, space cadet, her future secretary, princess, and a thousand other things he just couldn’t even think of at the moment.

 

And it had never, not once, let up.

 

Since that first day when they were only ten years old she had declared herself the future hokage and he’d been expected to believe it ever since.

 

And finally, after three years, Minato was done.

 

“I’m going to kill her,” he added flatly, ignoring the way Lee’s eyebrows raised even higher as she took him in.

 

He was going to beat Uzumaki into the ground, rub her face in the dirt, kill her, have Lee resurrect her, then kill her again for good measure.

 

“That’s a bit extreme,” Lee noted.

 

“Oh, but Lee, Uzumaki only does extremes,” Minato said shaking his head, feeling his lips twist into that almost blood thirsty smile, “In her own words, Uzumakis go big or they go home, believe it.”

 

“Surely, humiliating her in front of three of the five great hidden villages would be big enough,” Lee said, for once the voice of reason, and that by itself perhaps should have been alarming, but, like Minato had already noted, he’d long since past his own limits of reasonability.

 

“Not for Uzumaki,” he noted with a sense of finality, before, as an after thought adding in Lee’s standard joke with an amused quirk of his lips, “And don’t call me Shirly.”

 

Oh, he’d calmed down somewhat after the second task, and even that first round in the tournament. After all, Uzumaki had always been like that and it wasn’t as if it truly bothered him, or that anyone important actually listened to her opinions. Except, walking away from the stands, with her jeering after him, he’d realized that this would be the rest of his life.

 

Her screaming at him, calling him whatever she wanted, and him just standing there smiling like some kind of half-wit and taking it.

 

And god, what if she did become the yondaime hokage? What if he just stood by, tolerating it, for years, and somehow at some crucial moment the sandaime hokage would take her at her word and then he’d have to watch as that obnoxious braggart fulfilled his dream and then made him her personal secretary.

 

Minato, that night as he’d laid awake thinking of those terrible possibilities, decided he must take a stand somewhere. And here, at the chunin exams, seemed as good a time as ever to draw that line and say that enough was enough.

 

“Well alright, Minato,” Lee said with a slight frown before looking out ahead of them at the village itself, the vendors in the small market as well as the few and far between food stalls, “I don’t know if you’ve seen anything in our price range, but I haven’t. Being an orphaned genin is a hard life.”

 

It certainly was, but still, it was the life he had so there was not much use complaining. Minato offered Lee a somewhat softer smile as he took in her own disgruntled expression, foiled in her latest plan to celebrate the ending of her running hundreds of laps around Sunagakure.

 

“What I wouldn’t give for some of that delicious pocky,” Lee moaned, staring at the nearest overpriced pockey stand, likely because even for ramen it was just a bit too warm.

 

“Well, we’ll be home soon, I’m sure we can have some pocky then,” Minato said which didn’t seem to help Lee much as she sank further into her temporary depression over the lack of junk food.

 

“We should have taken more D-ranks,” Lee admitted, which… Was never a statement he’d though he’d ever hear pass through her lips. Clearly, she’d been doing too much taijutsu for the past month.

 

“Oh, hey! Namikaze-san and Eru-san!”

 

Minato and Lee turned, in tandem, to where just behind them, was a surprisingly familiar grinning suna nin. Surprisingly familiar, because they’d only run into him once or twice thus far, but oh, had he made an impression.

 

“It’s Yashamaru, from the second part of the exam, and well, the third when Namikaze-san beat my teammate,” the boy, still a good deal shorter and smaller than the pair of them and likely a few years younger, Yashamaru, reminded them.

 

He then stepped forward, offering them a smile that was much softer and far more genuine than any of the locals that Minato had met thus far, and offered them a polite bow, “It’s good to see you outside of the exams, you’re taking a break too then, before tomorrow, I mean?”

 

“Well, we were about to give up on our break, everything’s a little outside of our price range,” Minato started, already turning away and Lee with him, but the boy held up his hand to stop them, digging through his pocket for a wallet with the other.

 

“Suna nin don’t pay the same taxes you do, I can get you whatever you want,” he stopped looked at them, flashed a rather awkward grin, “Within reason, at any rate.”  


“Oh, you don’t have to, really,” Minato started but the boy talked over him.

 

“Don’t worry about it,” the boy said with a rather easy grin, “Besides, I wanted a chance to talk to you anyways and didn’t think I’d really get the opportunity. Things are… a bit tense, aren’t they?”

 

That was the understatement of the century, even now, with them standing in the middle of the streets there was that palpable tension clinging to the air. Not to mention it seemed like whenever he and Lee walked anywhere people were staring.

 

Then, motioning to the stalls Yashamaru asked, “So, what would you like?”

 

Lee cut in before Minato could even open his mouth with an insistence that should have terrified any normal genin, “Pocky.”

 

However, their blonde Suna friend seemed to take Lee’s intensity in stride.

 

“Pocky,” the boy nodded slowly to himself as he counted coins, “Alright, I can do that.”

 

Then shutting his wallet, he had them follow him into the relatively short line, where he paid for three orders of pocky, and then down a few side streets and alley ways and then up onto a small roof, “Here we are. Sorry about the walk, but Suna’s a bit short on public seating. Besides, the view’s better out here, sometimes, on clear days, I wonder if you can almost see all the way to your country.”

 

“This is your house?” Lee asked, looking around somewhat warily though not nearly as much as Minato, who was beginning to wonder if this had been a good idea. Still, they were out in the open, and Minato could easily spot where Konoha’s quarters were. If the boy was going to try… something, Minato didn’t even know what, this wouldn’t be the place to do it.

 

However, unless the boy was already a very good actor, it didn’t seem as if he had anything in mind. Everything about him was perfectly relaxed, more, open, as he sat down cross legged on the ground, twisting his neck this way and that as he cracked it.

 

“Yes,” the boy nodded before hesitating slightly and adding with a grin as he dug into his own pocky, tossing the two other containers to Minato and Lee who caught them with ease, “We’re not really what you’d call a clan, though we do have a few shinobi in the family. I had an uncle who was a shinobi, otherwise my older sister, Karura, is a chunin, and I’m as you know a genin. Nothing like some of your Konoha clans though.”

 

“Neither Lee nor I are from a clan,” Minato noted, “We’re actually both orphans, for that matter.”

“Really?” the boy asked, blinking, looking genuinely surprised by this, “I never would have guessed that with all the rumors flying around.”

 

“Rumors?” Lee pressed with a pair of raised eyebrows, but this, if anything, seemed to amuse Yashamaru.

“Sure,” he then motioned to Minato with a chocolate covered pocky stick, “Well you, Namikaze-san, people more or less take at you and your sensei’s word. You’re very good, but you look like you could have walked out of wind country, especially with those futon jutsus, and you don’t have any technique that screams Konohagakure blood limit.”

 

He’d never thought of it like that, it was true though, Minato’s family had come from Wind once upon a time, and while there were fair skinned and fair-haired people in Konoha, it was true that Minato and especially Lee were in a notable minority.

 

“You, however, Eru-san,” Yashamaru said, moving his pocky stick to Lee, “Are an entirely different story. Bastard Uzumaki was the first rumor flying around, that I heard at any rate, but there’s no need to go through that sort of subterfuge for something like that, and besides, you don’t really look like Uzumaki Kushina when it comes down to it, and despite the impressive chakra you aren’t really using Uzumaki techniques, not like her anyway. However, no one’s ever heard of an Eru clan, no one’s even entirely sure how to go about spelling it.”

 

That would be because there wasn’t any real spelling of Eru, Lee still used katakana to this day to inscribe it, so that her name was always a strange mix of katakana followed by masculine kanji, a testament to how far and foreign England truly was.

 

“Still, no one’s quite willing to believe that you’re really from a civilian family, let alone an orphan,” the boy concluded before smiling, “The things you learn just by asking. Of course, I wonder if they’ll even believe me. Everyone must think it’s much more exciting, if you came from a mysterious Konoha clan instead.”

 

“Nope, it’s a pretty boring origin story, I had the most civilian of civilian relatives,” Lee said dully before clarifying, “I lived with my aunt and uncle until immigrating to Konoha, they were… unpleasant, and likely not sentient.”

 

“No one’s origins are truly boring,” Yashamaru dismissed pleasantly, before motioning to himself, “Look at us, we’ve been talking about our boring origins for several minutes now. It’s fascinating, I think, where people come from.”

 

And he really was such a very pleasant little boy, this kid a few years younger than them who had been a monster out in the field. Yes, pleasant was the word that churned unsettlingly in Minato’s stomach.

 

He didn’t know why either, because the kid was well… Likeable, the most likeable foreign nin they’d come across thus far, but there was something about how very likeable he was that was itching at Minato in almost the same vein that Uzumaki being Uzumaki itched at Minato.

 

Well, not quite the same, as Kushina so often and eloquently put it, there was only one Uzumaki Kushina, believe it.

 

Except, he hadn’t felt this way before all of this, not in the actual fight anyways. Of course, they hadn’t really exchanged words then, and he’d been more tired than anything else and briefly exasperated that Lee felt the need to put on even a minimal show.

 

Still, there was something about this kid that just… bugged him, and that in itself bugged him. Minato liked to think he got on pretty well with most everyone, Uzumaki notably excluded, and he was getting on fine with this kid, him and Lee were (which was a bit of a shock, Lee rarely got on with anybody).

 

Maybe, what he was really thinking, was that Minato rarely had a problem with anybody, he liked most people, and those that he didn’t he had a good reason not to. Even Uzumaki he didn’t really hate, he just found her… obnoxious.

 

So why was this, frankly very likeable, Suna genin an exception to this?

 

“By the way, there’s something that’s been bothering me, about when we met in the labyrinth,” the boy started, shaking Minato out of his own thoughts.

 

“Lee’s jutsus?” Minato asked, a bit more harshly than he’d intended, a bit blunter than he’d intended for that matter, but Yashamaru didn’t seem to mind his slip and Lee didn’t even seem to notice as she kept her eyes on the boy, green and unreadable as always.

“No, I don’t think you’d tell me about that even if I asked,” he then smiled and lifted his left hand out towards the pair of them, “You, said, well, something a little strange about being left handed? I sort of went with it at the time, but it really felt like I was missing something important.”  


And Lee’s eyes practically lit up, in a way they hadn’t in nearly a month, since Jiraiya-sensei had decided to make her practice her katas until she was bleeding. She leaned forward, grinning, and stated, “The something you’re missing is called The Princess Bride.”

 

“The Princess Bride?” he repeated with a somewhat stunned, though still amiable, expression.

 

“It has everything,” Lee insisted, standing dramatically, as she proclaimed, “Kenjutsu, fighting, torture, poison, true love, hate, revenge, giants, hunters, bad men, good men, beautiful ladies, snakes, spiders…”

 

Minato glanced over to see how the boy was taking the deluge of information, or the fact, that apparently right here and now in Suna, Lee was about to reenact The Princess Bride, something he’d probably never asked for.

 

Yashamaru, however, actually looked entertained as his confused smile turned into a grin.

 

(That irrational dislike grew just a tad stronger.)

 

“Pain, death, brave men, cowardly men, strongest men, chases, escapes, lies, truths, passion, miracles…” Lee trailed off before falling back into a sitting position with a flop.

“All that in one story?” Yashamaru asked.

 

“Of course,” then, catching his look, she said, “It cannot be fully appreciated unless you hear it.”

 

And here, where anyone else probably would have taken that as their cue to lamely exit, the boy smiled (did this boy do anything but cheerfully smile?), and said, “I have time, I think.”

 

And so, Lily started, from the very beginning where there once was a beautiful farm girl named Buttercup (translated into the far more pronounceable and less suspicious Mitsubachi) and the farm boy she bullied named Westley (translated into the rough approximation, Sogen, Westley apparently meaning something close to meadow) and the unlikely and tender love that swiftly grew between them.

 

The tale went on from Sogen’s disappearance at sea at the hand of the Dread Pirate Roberts (hence forth translated as the Dread Pirate Hikaru as Lee was enjoying her irony or else running out of names) and Mitsubachi’s upcoming marriage to Prince Humperdink (whose bizarre name was oddly not translated) as well as her kidnapping by the Venetian (now a Iwa missing nin of high intelligence but no notable combat abilities) the drunkard Spaniard Montoya Inigo (now a Kiri missing nin by the name of Fuyuki, the eighth missing swordsman of the mist) and the giant Fezzick.

 

And with each step of the man in black’s inconceivable journey, his sword fight which Lee play acted by herself complete with all the acrobatics involved, his fight against the giant, and his battle of wits against the Iwa nuke nin, the boy watched in enchantment sucked into a tale that was, even with all the competition lined upon the shelf back in their apartment, also one of Minato’s favorites.

 

And as he watched, Lee’s delight and the boy’s, he finally hit on just what might be bothering him about this. It was petty, but part of it, perhaps a large part of it, was that he didn’t think anyone had ever looked at Lee like that. Not, at least, besides Minato himself.

 

In the orphanage, only Minato had picked up English, and so he alone had been the early audience to Lee’s tales of wonder. Even before that point, when Lee had become fluent, there’d been no room for anyone else and the MinatoandLee had already been cemented.

 

That world had seemed, did seem even now, so very small, a private thing to share between the two of them alone. Even translating the texts for the nidaime, for even Uzumaki to read, it wasn’t the same thing as this.

 

Minato didn’t like the idea of that world opening its borders and accepting more than just two.

 

“Alright, where is the poison?” Lee said, playing the man in black with an ease that came of years of devotion, motioning to the imaginary goblets of wine, one containing the undetectable and deadly Suna poison within it, “The battle of wits has begun. It ends when you decide and we both drink, and find out who is right and who is dead.”

 

“But it’s so simple,” Lee exclaimed, easily switching roles to the Iwa nuke nin about to partake in a deadly amount of hubris, an action that perhaps would have been better performed by clones had easy simple clones been in her repertoire, “All I have to do is divine from what I know of you: are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his own goblet or his enemy’s?”

 

Lee’s hands, pale delighted things, began to gesture expressively under Minato and Yashamaru’s watchful gazes, “Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I am not a great fool, so I clearly cannot choose the wine in front of you. But, you must have known that I was not a great fool, you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.”

 

Lee leaning back into the lazy role of the man in black asked, “You’ve made your decision then?”

 

“Not remotely,” Lee interrupted herself, “Because this poison comes from Suna, as everyone knows, and Suna is populated by perhaps the hardest of shinobi, and shinobi are used to having people not trust them, as you are not trusted by me, so I clearly cannot choose the wine in front of you!”

 

“Truly,” Lee remarked with an almost Orochimaru-esque dryness, “You have a dizzying intellect.”

 

“Wait til I get going!” Lee exclaimed, “Now, where was I?”

 

Yashamaru, next to Minato, attempted to stifle a giggle behind a small hand, his delighted smile reaching his eyes.

 

“Sunagakure,” the man in black coolly responded.

 

“Yes, Suna. And you must have suspected I would know the poison’s origin, so I clearly cannot choose the wine in front of me.”

 

Lee, as the man in black, lifted her eyebrows, “You’re stalling now.”

 

Quickly, in panicked rage, Lee as the Iwa nuke nin cried out, “You’d think that, wouldn’t you?!”

 

Then, in desperation, the nuke nin continued, “You’ve beaten my giant, which means you’re exceptionally strong, so you could’ve put the poison in your own goblet, trusting on your strength to save you, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But, you’ve also bested my Kiri nuke nin, which means you must have studied, and in studying you must have learned that man is mortal, so you would have put the poison as far from yourself as possible, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me!”

 

The man in black smirked, Lee’s eyes dancing the way they always did when something shiny and new and bright had caught her magpie’s interest, “You’re trying to trick me into giving something away, it won’t work.”

 

“It has worked!” Lee cried out, standing now, “You’ve given everything away! I know where the poison is!”

 

“Then make your choice,” Lee as the man in black stated, still perfectly calm, perfectly steady.

 

“I will, and I choose…” Lee trailed off, pointed, “What in the world can that be?”

 

Then, with the man in black’s attention distracted, Lee switched the imaginary goblets.

 

“What? Where? I don’t see anything.”

 

“Well, I, I could have sworn I saw something,” Lee as the Iwa nin said with a shrug, “No matter. First, let’s drink. Me, from my glass, and you from yours.”

 

Lee toasted a glass to herself, Yashamaru watching riveted while Minato, even with everything on his mind, couldn’t help but crack a smile for all that would come next.

 

“You guessed wrong,” Lee said as the man in black.

 

And ah, here it was, the beautiful hubris as Lee as the Iwa nin declared, “You only think I guessed wrong! That’s what’s so funny! I switched glasses when your back was turned! Ha ha! You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders – the most famous of which is ‘never get involved in a land war in Ame’ – but only slightly less well known is this: ‘Never go in against an Iwa nin when death is on the line!’ Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha!”

 

Then, with that ridiculous smile on her face, Lee fell backwards dead much to the cheering and laughing of her audience.

 

“And to think, all that time it was your cup that was poisoned,” Lee remarked to herself as the tied and bound Mitsubachi hime.

 

“They both were poisoned,” the man in black stated as he helped her to her feet, “I spent the last few years building up an immunity to this particular Sunagakure poison.”

 

Yashamaru burst out laughing, clutching his sides and stalling Lee’s remarkably good one man performance, Minato joining him as he clapped, already looking forward to the fire swamp and the rodents of unusual size that dwelled there.

 

Still, even with the shared laughter, the shared delight of The Princess Bride and Lee’s passionate one-man reenactment, he couldn’t help but think that next time, though not nearly as much as Uzumaki, he’d make sure to kick the shit out of this brat too.

 

For good measure, and all that.


	23. Mortal Kombat: Genin Style

_In which the second round of the tournament begins with Jiraiya and Sakumo as unofficial commentators, Minato and Kushina prepare for a battle that will finally prove once and for all whether Minato is a flakey princess, and Haru prepares himself for an honorable if violent death._

 

* * *

 

“Hey, Jiraiya!”

 

Jiraiya, sitting amid the idly chatting jonin-senseis and various Konoha nin, squinted through Suna’s rather intense midday sunlight towards the bottom of Konoha’s section of the stands and spotted Hatake Sakumo grinning up at him like a fool.

 

“Sakumo,” Jiraiya greeted with his own grin, waving him up to take the seat next to his, probably looking a little too enthusiastic to see an old friend that he’d only just seen roughly a month before, “You’re late, you bastard!”

 

And he was, or at least, Jiraiya thought so, granted no jonin besides the jonin senseis had the time to spare to twiddle their thumbs for a month and half in Suna, so it was understandable, but god had Jiraiya needed to vent to somebody.

 

And even compared to Oro, who no doubt didn’t want to listen to Jiraiya whine, or Tsunade, who never wanted to listen to Jiraiya whine, Sakumo was an excellent choice for this sort of thing as he was usually good natured and patient enough to listen to Jiraiya grouse.

 

“Late, they’re only just now getting to the last rounds of the tournament,” Sakumo chided as he reached Jiraiya and sat down next to him, glancing down towards the genins all milling about in the seats closest to the arena, team seven’s ridiculous hair colors noticeable even at this distance, “Besides, it’s shocking I got even this much time off, or someone to agree to watch Kakashi while I was away.”

 

That was a fair point, even if it was peacetime Konoha couldn’t exactly spare ANBU captains like Hatake Sakumo. All the same, Jiraiya huffed, “You’re still late. I needed you here a month ago, your future apprentice is driving me up the wall.”

 

Sakumo had the nerve to grin at that, as if he found Eur Lee’s daily antics amusing and adorable, “Of course she is, I’d expect nothing less.”

 

Yeah, Jiraiya would like to see how he was fairing when he was the one stuck with her all the damn time. Some part of Jiraiya would no doubt miss his three genins once they went their separate ways, Minato excluded, but goddammit was he ready to be done with some of this bullshit.

 

“Of course, you wouldn’t,” Jiraiya scoffed, “You’re going to regret that, you know. Soon enough you’ll be having your own Eru Lee adventures, and when you come whining to me, I will just laugh in your face like a jackass.”

 

“No, you won’t,” Sakumo dismissed both good naturedly and easily, “You’ll just be glad someone finally understands all the trouble you’ve been going through.”

 

Goddammit, he was right.

 

Jiraiya sighed, wondering if he should even bother to tell Sakumo what had happened thus far, in the first and second task, the problem was that unless he was going into detail then Sakumo had probably already guessed.

 

Though it had felt shocking at the time, the idea of Lee using kage level genjutsu and ninjutsu to destroy the infrastructure of the test was something that just about any jonin in the know from Konoha could guess.

 

He sighed again, a little louder this time, much to Sakumo’s amusement and his other comrades’ complete indifference (they’d been listening to Jiraiya sigh for weeks, at this point, they no longer gave a shit how despondent Jiraiya was feeling today).

 

“Well, I guess you’ll be wanting to know who’s still left in the competition then,” Jiraiya finally settled on as his eyes drifted to the kids, to Uchiha Mikoto and Rasa of Sunagakure who were now preparing themselves for the first match of the day.

 

“I’m assuming Lee and Minato are,” Sakumo noted, a not unreasonable guess given what he knew about the pair.

 

Jiraiya snorted in amusement, “That wasn’t a hard one to figure out. You’ve also got Uchiha Mikoto, two Suna brats, the Hyuga twins, Uzumaki, the Yamanaka heir, the Nara heir, the Akimichi heir, and surprise of all surprises Haru.”

 

“Haru?” Sakumo asked, looking downright shocked, which said a lot about the reputation of Jiraiya’s third genin student, “Your student Haru?”

 

“I know, his opponent surrendered last time,” Jiraiya explained with a shrug, not really wanting to go into the whys of that, especially as he wasn’t entirely sure he understood it himself except that Haru had looked like terrifying Konoha secret Uzumaki blood limits.

 

Which, technically, the rinnegan was a terrifying blood limit to conquer all terrifying blood limits. That, alone, had given Uzumaki Nagato of Ame almost limitless potential. Technically, Haru now had the same potential.

 

However, they were also talking about Matsuda Haru, who had taken weeks to learn how to turn it off and, more, didn’t have the natural Uzumaki chakra reservoirs to support a blood limit like the rinnegan let alone the natural talent. Even if Haru continued to diligently train, with that physical limit, it was highly unlikely he would ever be able to fully master it the way Nagato had the potential to.

 

“Surrendered?” Sakumo asked before, with raised eyebrows, glanced down at Haru’s white hair, “Well, I hope he knows that’s unlikely to happen twice.”

 

Jiraiya laughed, oh, he was pretty sure that Haru had known that from the very beginning. Say what you like about the kid, but he had no illusions of where he stood, as a dead last, he was way more pragmatic and realistic than Jiraiya had been as a brat.

 

The announcer spoke over the intercom, informing the crowd that the match was about to start, and there Mikoto and Rasa entered the ring, two figures whose features were barely visible at this distance, only the red of the Suna genin’s hair and the Uchiha black. Still, Jiraiya had no doubt that Uchiha Mikoto’s sharingan eyes were blazing red and black.

 

“And Uchiha Mikoto, not Fugaku?” Sakumo asked as the match began, cutting straight to the heart of the matter, or at least, the thought that had struck Jiraiya when he had watched that match.

 

“Yes, those two fought during the first round, Uchiha Mikoto won,” Jiraiya said, and Sakumo didn’t need to be told more than that, Uchiha clan politics, while nothing Jiraiya wanted to stick his nose into were blatant enough for everyone in the village to realize just what this meant.

 

Mikoto, while the only child of the current clan head, was not slated to become clan head herself due to the misfortune of having been born a woman, Uchiha Fugaku, her distant cousin, had been selected for that in her place and was known to even the greater village to be her future fiancé. For Mikoto to beat him as easily and as swiftly as she had, in the chunin exams with everyone as a witness…

 

Jiraiya wondered what exactly her clan would say about that and what kind of repercussions it would have.

 

He watched as the pair started, Suna’s Rasa quite talented himself and both faster and stronger than Uchiha Mikoto, the boy getting in the first few blows and throwing the Uchiha backwards towards the stone walls of the arena.

 

Likely it came down to two choices. Would Uchiha Mikoto become the next clan head or would Uchiha Fugaku or some other man they chose if his performance here today discouraged the elders? The first, in any other clan except perhaps the Hyuga, would be the obvious choice. But the Uchiha were not simply any other clan, they never had been, and Jiraiya couldn’t help but think that they would not take this sitting down.

 

He watched as Mikoto viciously struck back at her opponent, making up for her lack of speed, height, and strength with the sharingan, allowing her to see her opponent’s moves almost before he made them.

 

And ultimately, Jiraiya wondered as he tracked the pair, did it really matter? Someone was going to end up clan head and ultimately Jiraiya didn’t really interact that much with the clan. Maybe it wouldn’t really make much of a difference, maybe Jiraiya could spend his time thinking about other things, but maybe…

 

He watched as Mikoto moved like water, more, he imagined her eyes spinning as black flames erupted at the boy’s feet, driving him backwards then down into the earth with Mikoto’s kunai at his throat, making it a match. And he noted, again, how he’d never seen that from the Uchiha jonin he knew with three-tomoe sharingans, and how, the few times he had seen Mikoto’s face up close with the sharingan active, hers had looked nothing like the usual pinwheel eyes.

 

Something, clearly, had changed and Jiraiya had the strangest feeling that it was a very important change at that.

 

And so, all Jiraiya could say to Sakumo, as Uchiha Mikoto was declared victor and the Konoha section wildly cheered, was, “The Uchiha elders must be sweating kunai right about now.”

 

It said a lot that not only did Sakumo not argue, but he even burst into laughter at the comment.

 

* * *

 

“Kick that blonde bastard’s ass, Choza!” Minato cried out, leaning over the railing overlooking the arena, looking unusually intense for the normally cheerful, easygoing, and unflappable Namikaze Minato.

 

“Yeah, kick his girly looking ass for being even girlier looking than Namikaze!” Uzumaki Kushina, never to be outdone, was also practically hanging over the railing as she bellowed down into the pit, ignoring Minato’s look of irritation at her comment.

 

This, this had been going on all morning.

 

Haru sighed, adjusted his sunglasses, still squinting against the sunlight as he watched Akimichi Choza enlarge himself to a ridiculous of size to crush the tiny Yashamaru of Suna who had taken to avoiding this with that same athletic ease he’d shown in the second round of the exam (or at least, what Haru had seen of the second round of the exam before he’d been knocked to the side like a rag doll then dragged by Lee through a labyrinth). To Haru, they both looked damn intimidating, even the Suna-nin who couldn’t be more than eight or nine, certainly enough to put him out of his misery.

 

Even if, with his eyes finally back in normal average working order, he wasn’t hemorrhaging chakra.

 

That was the trouble, Haru was so… Well, talentless, that it made it hard for him sometimes to judge the abilities other people. Especially when they were fighting him, Lee, Minato, or even another civilian born brat like him didn’t really make too much of a difference to him.

 

Of course, while they’d been fighting for a while now, and it didn’t look like the blonde Suna-nin had any clan techniques necessarily, Haru had the feeling that it wasn’t going particularly well for Choza. He looked slower than he’d been at the beginning, and the fact that he was bringing in Akimichi techniques at all was probably not a great sign.

 

“Dammit, Choza, he has too much chakra control for that to work!” Minato cried out in despair as the Suna nin found purchase on the waves of sand emanating from a small crater giant Choza had left behind. Minato gripped his hair with a moan, almost tearing it out, ignoring the raised eyebrows of Yamanaka and Nara, Choza’s actual teammates, apparently even more invested in his friend’s victory than they were.

 

“Hey, asshole, he’s still doing better than you would,” Uzumaki retorted, glancing away from the fight to give Minato a reprimanding glare.

 

“Oh, shut up, Uzumaki,” Minato retorted with a rather flat glare towards his red-headed rival, “When has anyone ever asked for your opinion?”

 

Uzumaki spluttered, her cheeks red with embarrassment, “People ask for my opinion all the time, jackass, believe it!”

 

“Kushina,” Mikoto said from the sidelines, clearly as done with this as Haru himself was, “Can you please stop goading Namikaze? I think I’m getting a headache.”

 

“Dammit, Mikoto,” Uzumaki said, whirling towards Uchiha Mikoto with an overdramatic expression of betrayal on her face, “You’re supposed to be on my side!”

 

Haru stopped listening, not even caring anymore. He just wished that Minato and Uzumaki would stop bickering with one another.

 

Apparently, Lee, of all people, was of the same opinion as she stayed in her seat beside Haru, staring ahead at Uzumaki and Minato’s backs with a rather dull and exasperated look on her face.

 

They probably both should have been standing and cheering for Choza, everyone else was, well except Uchiha Mikoto who appeared to still be catching her breath from her fight, but she at least had an excuse.

 

That fight that had also been… very intimidating.

 

“Dead Last, would you please stop sighing?” Lee remarked, catching Haru mid sigh as she glanced over towards him with those strange green eyes of hers, otherworldly even in direct sunlight, “You’re blowing my concentration in watching Montoya Inigo face the Akimichi’s answer to _Godzilla_.”

 

“I don’t even know what that means,” Haru groused, his own words drowned out by another cheer of enthusiasm from the Uzumaki and Minato duo to see who could have more Konoha team spirit.

 

“It means that I’m not sure going giant is going to get the chip guy much traction,” Lee said with a shrug, clearly referring here to Akimichi’s habit of eating chips all the time, “Plus, I’m not sure how long he can keep it up, and our friend from Suna isn’t bad.”

 

“Yeah, about that…” Haru paused, glanced at Minato, and wondered if he really was about to ask this, to Lee of all people who had all the perception of a brick wall, but then figured he might as well, “Do you have any idea why Minato’s so…”

 

“Come on, Choza,” Minato screamed with determination down into the ring, almost at an Uzumaki volume himself, his pale hands waving about with equal enthusiasm, “Watch out for his kunai! You can do it! I know you can do it!”

 

“… Invested?” Haru finally finished lamely.

 

Lee considered the back of Minato’s head carefully, leaning forward, placing her pale chin into an equally pale hand, and finally mused, “I’m not entirely sure, but I don’t think Minato likes him, although why he doesn’t is anybody’s guess.”

 

Well, that was an explanation, not one Haru wouldn’t have guessed, but he could see it now that she said it. Still, with that, he looked back at her and asked, “And you don’t have a problem with him?”

 

“Yashamaru?” Lee asked, apparently even going so far as to remember his name when she still couldn’t remember Haru’s, “Oh no, I rather like him, it’s not every day one meets a fellow admirer or The Princess Bride.”

 

And that, Haru thought in dumbfounded amazement as he took in her cheerful smile, might very well be it.

 

Had Lee ever had a friend, a close non-reluctant friend that wasn’t out of association with Minato, that wasn’t Namikaze Minato? Haru was damn sure she hadn’t, even himself or Nara Shikaku, he wouldn’t exactly label as friends with Lee. She was… not necessarily unapproachable, but intimidating, at once too cold and too bright, there was an inhuman air about her that one couldn’t simply approach.

 

Minato, ever since Haru had known him, had been the only one truly able to withstand it.

 

If Yashamaru of Sunagakure had even been able to handle a glimpse, a chance meeting with Lee, and her weird English television babble, then that was a first for all of them. And he could see how Minato… might not like it.

 

And suddenly he was wondering just what it was Minato felt about Lee. They’d been best friends forever, practically twins, everybody knew that but… Well, now Haru was wondering if it wasn’t something more than that, or certainly heading there.

 

“Huh,” was all he said out loud, earning a rather wry look from Lee, as if she knew he had more to say on the subject and wasn’t necessarily appreciating his silence.

 

Still, he added before she could say anything, “I wouldn’t worry, he’ll calm down.”

 

And he would, when they were back in Konoha and he stopped feeling territorial and flustered and got whatever the hell was up with him and Uzumaki out of his system he’d probably be back to his usual old self.

 

“Oh, I’m sure he will, this Uzumaki thing has been building for years though,” Lee said, nodding towards the pair of them with a too cheerful grin, “There is only so much predicting of one’s future as Uzumaki’s secretary that a man can take.”

 

“Right,” and then he sighed again, Minato’s upcoming climactic battle with Uzumaki Kushina only reminding him of whatever upcoming battle awaited him, “I’m going to die, aren’t I?”

 

“Oh, probably,” Lee said, blunt and tactless as ever.

 

She spared him a glance then, noting, “You could always surrender.”

 

He could, he probably would, if he had any thought at all to his own health. Still, there was something so... He didn’t know, pathetic, maybe, about just surrendering like that. Sure, it’d seemed like the right thing to do the first time and it probably was this time but he wanted to have some pride as a shinobi.

 

“And there goes the chip guy,” Lee noted as Choza was dealt a finishing blow, having shrunk back down to normal size and been thrown into a wall, Minato crying out in despair as Choza trudged his way back up the stairs to the conciliatory remarks of his own teammates.

 

Haru however watched silently, feeling his mouth go dry in panic, as he registered just how battered Akimichi Choza looked, and how painful that last blow had seemed.

 

That was it, Haru was going to die.

 

“Good fight, Choza,” Minato said, apparently over his momentary despair, as he approached his friend, “You gave him a good run.”

 

“Right,” a wheezing rather pale Akimichi said as he stumbled towards a seat, “A good run… Minato, if you fight him next… Give him hell.”

 

Minato grinned back at his friend, gripping his arm in friendship before turning back towards the field, awaiting the next announcement.

 

“Please, flakey bastard give him hell?” Kushina asked, because she was never one to be outdone even when no one was paying any attention to her, “Because if Namikaze’s facing me next I can guarantee you that he won’t be in the next round.”

 

“Oh, Uzumaki,” Minato said with his polite smile that spelled death for anyone looking directly at it, “If we’re fighting today then I eagerly look forward to destroying you completely.”

 

And once again there was that tension in the air as Minato and Uzumaki were on the same wavelength of beating the shit out of each other once and for all. They were welcome to it, so long as Haru himself wasn’t standing in the way of that.

 

Unfortunately for everyone, the announcer stated, “Next in the arena, Uzumaki Kushina of Konoha and Yamanaka Inoichi of Konoha!”

 

“Goddammit!” Uzumaki cried out in frustrated rage, ignoring Inoichi’s paling face beside her as he realized what exactly he’d be facing in the arena, “Ugh, you better win Namikaze so I get the chance to kick your ass!”

 

“I would dream of nothing else, Uzumaki,” Minato said pleasantly, not even looking at her before turning his head and looking at Inoichi, “Of course, Inoichi, feel free to hand her braggart ass to her.”

 

Inoichi looked suitably not enthused by that prospect as he gave Minato a rather weak smile in return.

 

Well, at least this meant that it wouldn’t be Haru facing a raging Uzumaki Kushina.

 

A fact that he rather appreciated when, within a half hour, a raging Uzumaki Kushina through massive amounts of chakra, fuinjutsu, and sheer force of will had beaten Yamanaka Inoichi to a bloody pulp.

 

* * *

 

“You know, I didn’t expect this to be so…” Sakumo started, trailing off as he searched for the right word as his eyes locked onto the arena blow.

 

“Entertaining?” Jiraiya finished for Sakumo.

 

“Right, yes, that,” and it was, surprisingly, Jiraiya had never paid too much attention to the chunin exams and not just because they were a relatively recent invention and tended to only take place between multiple villages during peacetime.

 

Not having any genin students of his own and not really knowing any genin personally it hadn’t seemed like a great use of his time, even when it was being held in the village. For that matter, he’d barely pay attention to the results. Jiraiya didn’t usually find himself working with newly minted chunin for that matter.

 

However, this was far more engrossing than Jiraiya had ever been expecting if only for the gossip.

 

First, Uchiha Mikoto kicking ass and embarrassing all the Uchiha elders, the Akimichi heir facing the surprisingly good eight-year-old Suna nin, then later Uzumaki Kushina wailing on the poor Yamanaka heir (probably out of frustration that her fight with Minato had been postponed again), which left Lee and Minato still to go.

 

Point being, it was almost better than television. Jiraiya wish he had some popcorn.

 

“Who do you think Lee will fight?” Sakumo asked, clearly getting way too into this too, likely having not been to a chunin exam since he’d done his forever ago.

 

“Does it really matter?” Jiraiya asked, “Not sure anyone could give her a run for her money, maybe Minato, since he knows how she ticks.”

 

Not to mention that he would be the one to best exploit Lee’s prescribed limitations by Jiraiya, not that Lee would take that sitting down, even from Minato. That could actually be a damn interesting battle because of it, either way though, that’d be a weird one to happen so early. Though he supposed with random orders it could always happen.

 

“Right, who’s left then?” Sakumo asked.

 

“The Hyuga twins, the Nara clan heir, Lee, Minato, and Haru god bless his untalented soul…” Jiraiya mentally made his way through the genins, “Yup, I think that should be it for now, and then tomorrow we get the next round.”

 

Lee would be victorious, certainly. Against the Hyuga twins Minato might actually run into trouble though it was hard to say. Haru was probably doomed no matter what, and probably knew it so would forgive Jiraiya for thinking it for him.

 

Either way, it should still be damn entertaining.

 

With Uzumaki Kushina and Yamanaka Inoichi leaving the ring the new contenders were announced, and at their names, Jiraiya balked, “Holy shit, the Hyuga twins, they’re playing hard ball.”

 

Uchiha Fugaku and Uchiha Mikoto had been one thing, a very contentious thing at that, but this… If there was a clan that could give the Uchiha a run for their money it was the Hyuga, where all but the main family were sealed, their deaths essentially at the fingertips of the clan elders but written off as being necessary to protect the blood limit.

 

Normally, the clan heir would have been decided already, the eldest child of the current clan head. However, the current Hyuga clan head had had twins, Hiashi and Hizashi and rumor had it that they were both of relatively equal aptitude and strength.

 

One of them would become the next clan head and would live in freedom from the mechanizations of the elders, the other would become yet another branch Hyuga member.

 

And a battle in the chunin exams, although perhaps not definitive, could perhaps provide a clear means of which son was worthier of becoming the next head of the clan. In other words, everything could come down to this fight.

 

And perhaps, perhaps, that made this less heartbreaking for the brothers. Because here, above all other moments, was a definitive end to a question that had haunted them all their lives.

 

The Konoha section watched the fight in relative silence, marking Hyuga clan techniques here and there, and Jiraiya, as he watched, wondered if the one brother was not just a little slower than the other. Not out of skill, but out of hesitation, as if his mind was on far more than this fight.

 

And in the end, to the cheering of the crowd, it was Hyuga Hiashi who was declared the winner, much to the congratulations of his brother. And though Jiraiya could barely make out his face, he wondered, what sort of expression was on it.

 

Jiraiya liked to imagine that it was not joyful, but rather, torn, as he realized just what his brother had done for him.

 

Clan politics, it truly was despicable stuff. There were times, more than others, that Jiraiya was sincerely glad that he was an orphan and would never belong to a clan.

 

“Well, I guess that leaves Minato-kun, Lee-chan, Haru-kun, and the Nara brat,” Jiraiya finally said, breaking the silence as he watched the brothers, arm in arm, ascend the stair case back into the stands.

 

Which was not a good combination for Haru.

 

Especially with Minato looking… Very in the zone and ready to destroy anyone and everyone who got in his way, no matter his friendship with them. Which could make for some very interesting fights if Jiraiya thought about it, Minato versus the Nara clan heir or even Lee could yield some very interesting results.

 

Of course, probably because of that thought, the announcer declared the next fight to be Minato against Haru.

 

* * *

 

“Well, Dead Last, I will make sure to write you a glorious epitaph,” Lee said as she slapped him on the back with a grin, propelling him forward to his doom.

 

To Minato she simply saluted, accepting his small smile of gratitude with a grin of her own, no words of luck or encouragement for him. Oh no, Lee, like everyone else, had already written him off.

 

Of all the days to fight Namikaze Minato, this was not the one Haru would have chosen.

 

The stairs down into the arena seemed overwhelming and infinite. As the sun beat down upon him it was like three was a drum beat inside his head, except it was word, repeated over and over again, “Surrender.”

 

As soon as you get the chance, Dead Last, surrender like you would have last time, give up, go back into your hole and live another day. And hadn’t he thought that last time? Wasn’t there no shame in surrender, in knowing your own limitations, in knowing that Minato looked like he was in no mood to show mercy today?

 

Except…

 

Except he was also so very tired of being Dead Last, even if he was Dead Last, even if he might not necessarily be Dead Last next year or the year after that. Surely, at least some point in this exam, he had to make some show of standing on his own two feet.

 

As they faced each other on the sand, Minato raised his eyebrows at him as Haru assumed a fighting formation, Minato looking far too relaxed about all of this.

 

As the referee signaled them he easily dodged Haru’s first attack, Haru’s kunai missing by miles as he skated backwards, “You’re not surrendering?”

 

Haru gritted his teeth, trying his best to stay upright and ignore the pain as Minato’s leg came down against his back, pushing him towards the earth. “No,” he managed to get out with a gasp of pain, “I think I’ll fight today.”

 

Minato’s eyebrows lowered and a rather put out look entered his eyes, along with a distinct lack of mercy, “I’m not going to take it easy on you just because we’re teammates, Haru.”

 

And indeed he didn’t as another kick propelled Haru backwards and into the wall, already battered from previous fights. Haru tried to smile, it came out more of a grimace as his ribs started to ache, “I don’t remember asking you to.”

 

He barely managed to dodge Minato’s fist, dropping to the ground and rolling away from him, losing his sunglasses in the process. And there was Minato, already forming hand seals for futon jutsus, screaming minature hurricanes flying towards Haru’s head.

 

And Haru really was delaying the inevitable.

 

Except… And here was a thought, the eyes. He had the rinnegan, unused and untested, but he had managed to turn it off and maybe he could turn it back on and do… something. He didn’t know, Jiriaya-sensei hadn’t exactly gotten into what the rinnegan did, more on how Haru was supposed to be turning it off if he wanted to have any chakra at all.

 

Still, it was something…

 

Unfortunately, that something did not pan out as, Haru standing there like an idiot trying to direct chakra to his eyes gave Minato more than enough chance dart in, punch Haru in the face, and then knock him out.

 

So, Haru ended up waking up to the sight of Minato’s blurry face, an apologetic smile, and a consolatory smile that Minato probably didn’t mean, “Sorry, Haru.”

 

And Haru, his head aching and his ribs aching and everything aching, once again wished he’d never been dragged into the chunin exams in the first place.

 

* * *

 

When Eru Lee and Shikaku Nara faced each other on the battlefield, the stadium held its breath, a thousand thoughts flew as green eyes met brown, as the pale red headed girl faced her tanned taller opponent.

 

And then, almost immediately, Nara Shikaku opened his mouth, “I surrender.”

 

And there was an audible groan of disappointment as Eru Lee, with raised eyebrows, surveyed her relieved opponent and proclaimed, “Somehow, Lazy Nara, that was even more anticlimactic than the last time.”

 

And that was the end of the second round of the chunin exam tournament.


	24. The Third War that Wasn't

_In which the chunin exams come to a climactic yet somehow anticlimactic close, dire consequences are courted then avoided, and Minato gets a brief and terrifying glimpse of the extent of Lee’s god like powers._

 

* * *

 

Lee and Minato, sitting on a fallen pillar, stared out into the great desert that could perhaps be Herbert Frank’s Arrakis or Lucas George’s Tatooine but was instead what remained of the elemental nation’s Sunagakure.

 

Time seemed frozen behind them, rather, it wasn’t seeming, it was frozen. Stuck in place by Eru Lee as the inevitable had come to pass.

 

With a sigh, staring out into the vast empty desert towards the land of fire and Konoha beyond it, Lee asked in a manner that wasn’t questioning at all, “I’m not going to be promoted, am I?”

 

Behind them, Uchiha Mikoto was still staring forth with her spinning red and black eyes, wheeling backwards away from Lee as she’d both over and underestimated Lee and over and underestimated the importance of the chunin exams themselves.

 

So much effort for what amounted to a small and rather petty battle.

 

In the stands shinobi were half in motion, flickering here and there with shunshin, darting away from the arena and the great explosion that was, like everything else frozen in its aftermath. Everything frozen, stuck for a single instant, except Minato and Lee.

 

“It could be worse,” Minato noted, failing to answer Lee’s rhetorical question, which implied that he agreed. A fair assessment, given everything.

 

“I singlehandedly destroyed an allied hidden village,” Lee stated without inflection, hand pressed to her ribcage where she could feel herself slowly but surely bleeding out from a wound that Uchiha Mikoto probably hadn’t meant to inflict quite so grievously.

 

“A technically allied hidden village,” Minato corrected, giving her a rather weak smile for his rather weak excuse, “It wasn’t Uzushio.”

 

Still, Lee snorted, wincing and clutching her ribs harder at the pain of the movement and the noise. Now, clearly, was not the time for laughter.

 

“Are you alright?” here was the concern, the initial concern that had had Minato racing out of the stands towards her even before Lee had collected herself, or rather, panicked and stopped everything before it could really blow up. Everything, except, of course, Namikaze Minato.

 

“Well, I may die,” Lee said with a rather wry smile on her face, “But I think it’s just a flesh wound, at the end of things.”

 

All of Lee’s wounds were just flesh wounds and all reports of her death were greatly exaggerated.

 

“Forgive me if I’m still concerned about your flesh wounds, Lee,” Minato said with his usual blinding grin, except it slipped all too quickly as he sighed and turned his head with hers once again, to view the aftermath of everything.

 

Lee’s hand was warm, sticky, and so very red with the color of her own blood.

 

“Well, Minato, what are we going to do now?”

 

* * *

 

The story of Eru Lee and Uchiha Mikoto blowing up Suna was not an overly complicated one. In fact, one might say it started the same way any adventure Lee embarked on started. Slowly and reasonably at first, with a simple premise like the last few rounds of the chunin exams, and then wildly spiraling out of control at the last possible moment with no one seeing it coming.

 

In fact, the only real warning had come the night before, when Hatake Sakumo had visited their team for dinner in their allotted quarters for the exam.

 

“Honestly,” Lee said over her bowl of rice and the cheapest meat one could buy in Suna’s market place, “It hasn’t been nearly as difficult as I thought it would be.”

 

Jiraiya scoffed, having heard this song and dance from Lee a number of times, but it didn’t stop it from being true. The first portion had been a cake walk, the second had been… Alright, it had been obnoxious what with her being concussed and dragging Dead Last through sand but once she’d decided to stop playing by Jiraiya’s dumb rules to the letter it’d been more than fine. The third, by comparison, had been even easier than the first two.

 

Lee had barely even done anything, the first poor bastard had been taken out in one hit, and Lazy Nara had out dead lasted Dead Last. So far, in this tournament, Lee hadn’t even done anything. Certainly Minato, Uchiha, Uzumaki, Lazy Nara, and well pretty much everyone else were working much harder at it than she was.

 

Which she’d thought was kind of the point, show your techniques and all that, except Lee wasn’t even getting a chance to do that. She was just… kind of standing around and waiting for it to be over.

 

“Well I’m glad I’m out,” Dead Last said with a rather overdramatic sigh, his swirly eyes had made him far more overdramatic and snarky than he’d previously been, “I don’t think I could handle another fight.”

 

“Sorry,” Minato said with a rather sheepish look on his face, earning a slight annoyed glare from Dead Last, who probably realized just as much as everyone else that even though Minato was sorry for kicking the shit out of Haru he’d still do it again if they were in the same position.

 

“No, Haru-kun, you did good,” Jiaraiya-sensei ushered, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m proud of you, you made it much further than I ever would have expected and with way more obstacles than your peers. You worked hard, and that, at the end of things, is the defining quality of a really gutsy shinobi.”

 

“He’s right,” Sakumo noted with a musing expression, “You meet those along the way who solely rely on their talent; in the end, it will only ever get them so far. Often, that sort of arrogance will get you killed…”

 

He trailed off with a darker if more thoughtful expression, likely thinking of all those fallen, arrogant, comrades in ANBU who had burned so swiftly and so brightly.

 

“Hey, I’m all for working hard,” Lee pointed out, motioning to herself, “I just never get much of a chance!”

 

Jiraiya sighed, rolling his dark eyes towards the ceiling as if the fickle and indifferent god that ruled their universe might intervene on his behalf, “Honestly, brat, I wish we were talking about you but for all the attitude problems you do have, smarmy arrogance and contentment with your talents aren’t among them.”

 

“Well, I hope I at least give you a chance,” Minato said, a slight flush creeping over his cheeks as he glanced at her then towards the wall, the meaning of his words lost in the movement. Of course, of anyone, he was one of the most likely to give her a run for her money if she was limited on her skill set.

 

That, then, was probably what he’d meant.

 

“He’s right, don’t either of you get arrogant though, you’ve both got at least one more fight to go,” Jiraiya said, then, looking at them both, at all of them actually he noted, “Actually, while I have the chance, I’ll just say that I’m proud of all of you. Even you, Lee, and all the work you’ve done here. Remember, it’s not about winning or losing the fights at this point, it’s about representing Konoha and making the right decisions.”

 

With a grin he leaned forward, “Just keep your heads about you, keep sharp, and you’ll do fine, brats.”

 

Sakumo raised a hand as if to stop this point with a joking and kind-hearted smile on his face, “Of course, since I did come all this way to see my future apprentice and all her friends, it’d be nice if you won.”

 

Jiraiya barked out a laugh and cried out something about undermining his teaching while Sakumo just shook it off, Minato, Lee, and Dead Last watching with some amusement as the chunin exams wound to a close.

 

Naturally, with that ringing endorsement and the good cheer of eating with Hatake Sakumo and team seven, it was not going to go fine. Of course, at the time, Lee hardly knew that. No, Lee was just wishing it wasn’t too hot out tomorrow, and, by some miracle, not too sandy.

 

Of course, the next morning it was, both too hot, and too sandy. And maybe that had something to do with it as Lee had stared down at the pit, sighed, and waited for everything to be over even while Uzumaki Kushina and Minato death glared at each other.

 

Maybe she wasn’t focused, maybe she really had been underestimating the competition and losing her head in arrogance. However, Lee liked to think, as she and Uchiha Mikoto were called as the first and last contenders into the ring, that Lee had simply failed to realize the instrument of destruction that was the mangekyo sharingan.

 

* * *

 

“Oh, Mikoto’s so lucky she’s going first,” Kushina groused, to Minato of all people. Minato wasn’t sure why Uzumaki was resorting to whining to him, the flakey princess who she was all too eager to beat into the dirt (not that he wasn’t aching to do the same) but surely, she had better options.

Then again, glancing at Shikaku, Inoichi, Choza, Haru, and everyone else giving the pair of them a wide berth, maybe not. As far as Uzumaki’s circle of friends went Mikoto and Lee were her best options here, and Lee herself wasn’t exactly a great choice as she only tolerated Kushina at the best of times.

 

Maybe, right now with Lee and Mikoto fighting against one another, she was the best choice he had.

 

Minato found that unbelievably sad and pathetic. However, a small vindictive part of him couldn’t help but be pleased, because surely even that small fact that Kushina had resorted to talking to Minato had to make its way through Kushina’s thick skull.

 

Not that Minato was going to be rude enough to point it out to her. If Uzumaki really was that stupid, then there was no hope for her at all.

 

Instead he asked drily, “She’s lucky fighting Lee?”

 

Kushina flushed slightly, realizing what she’d said, and retorted, “Well, no, not that! I just mean that I’m… Oh I’m so tired of waiting!”

 

“You’ll get your turn,” Minato hummed with a patience he wasn’t exactly feeling himself as he watched Lee and Uchiha match blades, Mikoto surprisingly quick to block and counter against Lee’s attacks with her own kunai, even ducking out of the way and avoiding Lee’s more creative and overpowered dotun jutsus, her eyes constantly focused on Lee’s face waiting for the moment Lee would glance up and…

 

“You mean we’ll get our turn,” Kushina scoffed, huffing and crossing her arms as she tapped her sandal against the earth, “I swear, if we aren’t actually fighting each other, then it is on like _Donkey_ _Kong_ back in Konoha.”

 

“Please stop borrowing Lee’s Leeisms,” Minato said with a sigh, knowing a lost cause when he saw one, because Kushina had taken to fragmented English with an unholy joy that no human being should have.

 

“You love them when Lee uses them,” Kushina dismissed with a wave of her pale hand, as if this completely justified her saying things like ‘Dead Last II: Electric Boogaloo’ in public.

 

For a moment they returned to blessed silence, watching as the match progressed, Lee getting several nasty hits in against Mikoto and Mikoto stumbling, faltering against dotun and katon jutsus as Lee retreated back into the earth, sending up spikes of earth towards the backtracking Mikoto.

 

“Mikoto’s not doing bad, she’s really improved these last few months,” Kushina noted quietly, “I mean, she always could give that asshole Fugaku a run for his money, but she slaughtered him the other day.”

 

Minato just nodded, thinking much the same thing himself. Sure, Lee wasn’t pulling her usual tricks she would on him, when ninjutsu was allowed. There were no chakra force fields, no teleportation, no grabbing jutsus, none of the many infinite variety of tricks Lee had up her sleeve that were almost impossible to truly counter. That said, her elemental jutsus were no mean thing, and though Mikoto was clearly worn down by them, she wasn’t done yet.

 

In the academy, Minato couldn’t help but think, Mikoto would have long since had to surrender by this point.

 

Then just as Lee burst from the earth, kunai flying out towards Kushina once again, powered by cutting futon jutsus whose strength Minato had been trying to match with his own jutsus for weeks, Mikoto blocked it and sent out a racing black fire towards her, forcing Lee backwards and her eyes up, to meet, momentarily with Mikoto’s.

 

For a moment Lee froze, Mikoto whipping through hand seals and screaming, and as Lee began to drift towards the earth, Minato felt as if he was watching everything in slow motion. Lee, falling away from the fire and towards the earth, eyes glazed by genjutsu, Mikoto finishing her jutsu and flinging a kunai out towards Lee so that it would fall in a nasty but non-lethal position in her stomach…

 

For a moment, as he watched, he wondered what exactly was in this for Uchiha Mikoto. Why was she trying so hard, pushing Lee, of all people far past where anyone had gone? Was it the heat of the moment? Or was it something else, what was Mikoto trying to prove?

 

Either way, Minato didn’t flinch, didn’t dare to blink when he realized it was too late. Lee’s eyes focused once again, she twisted her body out of the way of the kunai but only twisted it so that it struck higher, in between her ribs once again in a deeper cut than Mikoto had intended. She gave out a great cry as it dug into her, and there, in that moment, just before she hit the dirt bleeding, everything went white.

 

And the next thing he knew, the bleeding and dying Lee had blown up Suna, frozen time for everyone but Minato, and MinatoandLee were once again left with the aftermath. And all he could think, in stunned amazement, was that he and Uzumaki weren’t going to get that fight after all.

 

* * *

 

“It was a very good genjutsu,” Lee said, they had been silent for a good minute, waiting for the other to propose some solution to… this. This giant mess that Minato could barely even wrap his head around at the moment.

 

That Lee, Lee had… In an instant, without meaning to, destroyed a hidden village. Without anyone being able to stop her, just like that.

 

He’d always known that Lee was powerful, more powerful than she had any right to be, more powerful than he could probably ever comprehend. But in this moment, for perhaps the first time, he really and truly felt it.

 

More, he felt Lee, for perhaps the first time, felt it too. Or at least, how, with her abilities, how fragile the world really was.

 

“Better than any I’ve ever been trapped in,” Lee continued, before amending even as she held her broken and bleeding body together with a single hand, “Well, except reality of course. But aside from that, it was almost eerily good. Better than I was expecting.”

 

“You still got out of it,” Minato said quietly, leaning forward to rest his chin on his shaking fingertips, staring out into what was left of this great hidden village and trying and failing to come to terms that it had just been standing two seconds ago.

 

It had been right there, right there! He had been sitting in its stands where Kushina and the rest were now, ducking away from the blast of… Whatever it was Lee had done. He had been right there, and now…

 

“Yes, but it took… time,” Lee finally settled on, “And it was an odd one too, because I knew I was in a genjutsu, I mean, I was aware and knew everything that was happening, but for a moment it was like I was trapped in my own body. And then I wasn’t but it was too late to get out of the way without teleporting.”

 

She glanced up at the stands, spotting Jiraiya-sensei’s dismayed and horrified look in the crowd, seated next to Hatake Sakumo (and wasn’t it strange that they were all unscathed, everyone Lee knew and respected or even was casually annoyed with was perfectly fine when half the stands themselves were missing completely), “I blame Jiraiya-sensei, if I didn’t have so many of his goddamn rules to remember we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

 

“Yes,” Minato said airly, not sure what he felt only… light headed, as if he wasn’t really here or really witnessing this. Everything had been fine, and then, just like that, it hadn’t. And of course, he’d been with Lee in this type of situation before, and it’d always been surreal and just a little frightening but…

 

He turned back to her, to her ribs, frowning and then pulled off his shirt and began to tear it into strips, “We need to wrap that, and get a medic nin.”

 

“I’ll be fine, Minato,” Lee scoffed, ignoring the dangerous amount of blood she was losing, had been steadily losing since this whole thing began.

 

“No, you’re won’t,” Minato corrected, “You’ve been bleeding out for five minutes and pressing your hand against it won’t do anything helpful!”

 

However, Lee merely smiled, looked at him fondly with those strange green eyes, the kind of eyes he knew he’d never see anywhere else in the world no matter how far he went, “I am not afraid to die.”

 

That, those words seemed to be it, enough to snap him out of his floating feeling as he stood, shoving the strips that were his shirt towards her, and cried out, “Well I am! I know you don’t think it matters and I know that maybe it doesn’t but… Goddammit, Lee, I care!”

 

He looked around them, at the mess they’d left in their wake, motioning towards it with a bitter smile, “More than all of… this, whatever this is, I care, Lee. I… I really care.”

 

With a sigh he sat back down, burying his face in his hands, exhausted without even having to fight and likely without going to fight. Still, silently, next to him, Lee slowly began to wrap the bandages around herself, already they were soaking through.

 

With a bitter laugh, shaking his head and looking around, he repeated her own question back at her, “What are we going to do?”

 

Lee said nothing for a few moments, stared out at their surroundings, glanced at her blood in the arena, and then at the caved in ruins of Suna, eaten away by sand and the wind as if they had been standing thousands of years longer than they should have. As if Lee’s final jutsu hadn’t been a mere explosion but instead a distortion of space and time which had dragged the Suna that would one day be into this modern present.

 

“Well, I’m not going to get promoted,” Lee restated, a very apt opinion that was probably a given at this point, “And… Well, we’ll probably go to war with Suna.”

 

Minato paused, froze, looked at her but she was serious. And he looked around them, the implications sinking in, that this… This disaster was an act of war, an act of war with an allied village, and it would drag them all back into the war they’d only just come out of and Lee would singlehandedly take the blame.

 

“We can’t go back to war,” Minato said slowly, shaking his head, “Not now, not because of this.”

 

“I don’t see much of a way out of it,” Lee said, not shrugging but giving him a dry enough look that the movement was implied. Except how could she say that so easily when they had all felt the shadow of what the second war had brought them?

 

There were tensions, even now there were tensions, and everyone was afraid and knew that a third great war was maybe really only a few years away, but he wasn’t ready yet. Lee wasn’t ready, he wasn’t ready, no one was ready for that yet.

 

Not now, not because of this…

 

Lee, either oblivious or uncaring of Minato’s internal agony, continued, “I mean, it’s not like we can…”

 

She trailed off, eyes growing distant, her expression fading away and leaving a curious blankness in its place.

 

“What?” Minato questioned, but she said nothing, instead a slow hopeful and enthused smile curled against her lips.

 

Finally, as she stood, hobbled to her feet, she said, “I mean, it’s not like we can just make it, so it never happened, can we?”

 

Minato for a moment just looked at her, but then he began to smile with her as the idea caught, and he realized, that even bleeding and blowing up hidden villages, with Lee anything was possible.

 

And even though it should concern that Lee could so easily create and destroy his world and all the people in it somehow it didn’t, as if deep in his heart, he had always known and bargained for that.

 

And that from Eru Lee, he would have accepted nothing less.

 

* * *

 

“Then it’s on like _Donkey_ …” Kushina trailed off, caught up to herself, flushed as she realized that she wasn’t sitting in the stands but was instead standing at the gate to Suna. Except, that wasn’t right, why would she have been sitting in the stands?

 

She blinked, taking in her surroundings, there was Jiraiya-sama, Hatake Sakumo, and the infamous team seven standing with him, Lee still sporting that nasty cut Mikoto had given her (and Sage, hadn’t Mikoto been aiming at all when she’d thrown that kunai? Kushina guessed it was heat of the moment, but god, it had been a bit too nasty for an exam), Haru the dead last looking as put out and exhausted as usual, and Minato the flakey princess looking a little more wary and rough around the edges than he’d been only a few minutes ago.

 

Or at least, Kushina thought so, it was kind of all fuzzy now. Sure, she remembered the last part of the exam, she remembered fighting, then walking here when it was all over and leaving with all of Lee’s foreign fans panting after her blood limits, and then…

 

“Oh goddammit!” Kushina said, Minato’s head whirled towards her, blue eyes strangely sharp even in the midday lighting, “I can’t believe I lost to that flakey princess! I will never live this down, believe it!”

 

Minato slowly, but surely, turned towards Lee (who was just watching Kushina’s torment without a shred of sympathy), while Kushina felt all her hopes and dreams crash around her. Seriously, she’d had one chance, one, and then she’d gone and blown it with…

 

She tried to remember, tried to think back, she remembered thinking it’d been a really good fight, surprisingly epic given it was her and well, Namikaze Minato (well that wasn’t fair, of course it was epic with her and Minato, for all his pretty flakiness he was talented), there had been seals everywhere, traps, explosions, but she couldn’t remember just what the finishing move had been.

 

She pointed dramatically at the blonde in question, “Just wait until we get back to Konoha and you can bet your ass that it’s on again! Like two times the amount of _Donkey Kong_!”

 

Minato sighed, rubbed at the bridge of his nose, and said, “Uzumaki, that’s not even how that phrase works.”

 

However, he stopped after that, really looked at her and for a moment Kushina felt the determination flood out of her. It was like… Well, like he was looking past all of her bravado and pride to the very center of her for the first time. Not judging, not liking or disliking, but really looking.

 

And his eyes were so blue.

 

He looked away though, smiling somewhat, and said, “Fine, Uzumaki, it’s on like twice the amount of _Donkey Kong_ when we get back to Konoha. Loser has to buy ramen for the victor and the witnesses.”

 

Kushina grinned, “Well you can bet your pretty ass that all of Konoha will be a witness, so you better get yourself some deep pockets, my pretty friend!”

 

“I said I agreed to a rematch,” Minato said, a tick in his blonde eyebrow, “Not that I agreed to go easy on you.”

 

“Who needs your pity?!” Kushina cried out, “I’m going to be the hokage, I can beat you any day of the week, believe it!”

 

Minato, Kushina couldn’t help but think, was kind enough not to mention that today, at least Kushina had walked. He just shook his head and instead slung an arm over Lee’s shoulder. And she was… she looked paler than usual, tired, more than she even had in her fight against Mikoto.

 

Minato leaned in close to her, and Kushina could just make out his lips as he asked against her ear, “Are you sure you’re alright?”  


“Enough,” Lee returned, except buried in that phrase was something else, something deeper, something that wasn’t alright at all except that it had no other choice but to be alright. Minato seemed to know exactly what she meant though because he smiled at her, that soft, understanding, smile that he always was capable of giving to Lee.

 

Even when she upset him or frightened him half to death.

 

Then, then he said the oddest thing, as if he didn’t even realize that Kushina, Haru, and Jiraiya were even there.

 

“Thank you.”

 

* * *

 

“Well, I guess Lee won,” Sakumo said to Jiraiya as he accompanied the group back to Konoha, hardly out of his way since, given the exams were over, he had no real reason to stay anyway. It was strange though, he kept getting the feeling that he needed to stay longer, like the exams weren’t supposed to be over yet or that he had expected them to last longer.

 

Oh well, it was probably that it had gone… Well, not like he’d expected, he hadn’t had too many expectations, but that it had somehow seemed anti-climactic.

 

He frowned, no, that wasn’t quite it. Mikoto and Lee’s fight had been very dramatic, Mikoto’s sharingan posing as much if not more of a threat than one would expect from an Uchiha even towards a genin like Lee. Though to be fair, Lee had limited experience fighting and sparring against Uchiha, probably something Sakumo would have to see to.

 

Yes, he thought as he eyed her wound, that would be very important.

 

“Are we surprised that Lee won?” Jiraiya asked next to him, glancing back at the kids who seemed lost in their own world at this point, exhausted and thinking quite somberly back on their triumphs and failures.

 

“No,” Sakumo said, “She relies a little too heavily on her A and S-ranked abilities, but I’m not surprised she won either. I just…”

 

“Yeah, I have that same feeling,” Jiraiya said wryly, almost darkly, “Like you’re still waiting for the other shoe to drop and something to just… happen.”

 

“Yes, that’s it!” Sakumo said, before smiling sheepishly and noting, “Minato did very well too, by the way, I think I forgot to say that to you when we were watching. It just seemed kind of rushed at the time, like I hardly had a chance to catch my breath before the next match started.”

 

Jiraiya considered this, frowning, and then said, “Now, this is going to sound really weird, and maybe being Lee’s sensei has just made me ridiculously paranoid. But do you have the feeling that we narrowly avoided some major diplomatic incident and the start of a war?”

 

Sakumo paused, somewhat alarmed, because he did have that feeling. Like they’d… Almost certainly brushed near to war and then somehow darted back again without anyone noticing. He considered it, narrowing down on its center, “Well, Lee certainly drew attention during the exams, I’m sure nothing good will come of that.”

 

“Yeah,” Jiraiya said with a slow considering nod, “That’s probably it. Goddammit Lee! You give her one job, one job, and she goes and…”

 

“Well,” Sakumo interrupted with a softer smile, glancing back towards the tired and wounded girl, who’d undoubtedly be carted to the hospital as soon as they entered Konoha and left to Tsunade’s tender mercies, “To be fair, whatever holes she manages to dig herself into, I think, somehow, in her own way, she always manages to dig herself out again.”

 

* * *

 

And just like that the chunin exams finished, Eru Lee the victor, and Konoha did not start the third shinobi war.

 


	25. The Breaking of Team Seven

_In which Minato sets out on a journey with Jiraiya which will undoubtedly include every prostitute across the elemental nations, Lee tries and fails to not corrupt the children, and the English Shinobi comes to a shocking conclusion._

* * *

 

 

“How long has it been since we’ve done this?” Minato asked over his bowl of ramen, sitting across from Lee in the booth with Haru beside him.

 

“Probably a month,” Lee said with an indifferent shrug, “It’s not like you and I have ever avoided ramen for large periods of time.”

 

“No, not that,” Minato said with a wave of his hand before motioning to all the members of team seven sitting together, “The three of us, I mean, team seven all eating together.”

 

“I can’t help that,” Haru groused, looking in slightly better condition than when he’d left now that he could at least turn the rinnegan off. Still, his eyes were so much darker now than the softer brown they’d once been and against his pale hair they were far more striking and intimidating than they’d ever been, “You guys never invite me.”

 

“You never want to come!” Lee balked, taken somewhat aback at Haru’s newly grown spine, as only a month or so ago he’d normally have let Lee walk all over him.

 

“Why would I want to come?” Haru asked, “All you’d do is call me Dead Last.”

 

“That’s your name, Dead Last,” Lee said rolling her eyes before giving Minato a rather pointed look, “And Dead Last’s right, if he was going to be like this then we shouldn’t have invited him in the first place.”

 

“Well, it’s hardly team seven without him,” Minato said before the two could start hissing at each other, “And for better or worse, this may be one of the last chances we get for a while.”

 

After returning from the chunin exams, promotions had been passed out rather quickly. Within a day of returning everyone was informed that Lee, Minato, Mikoto, and even Kushina were now chunin. A strangely kunoichi heavy group considering, but then, none of it was undeserved either and even the best of jonin and chunin often had to take the exam more than once…

 

Almost a week later and Minato still wasn’t quite used to the weight of his new chunin vest.

 

And with that Jiraiya had officially taken him as an apprentice, Lee now belonged to Hatake Sakumo, and Haru had supposedly been approached by none other than the nidaime at some point during the week. Just like they had all been told before the exams even started.

 

By the start of the next week, according to Jiraiya-sensei, he and Minato would be off to see the rest of the elemental nations. Doing all the things Jiraiya had put off due to teaching team seven, with Minato along for the ride, leaving the other two-thirds of team seven behind.

 

“It’s only a few months though,” Lee noted between mouthfuls of ramen, “Isn’t it?”

 

Minato nodded quickly, reassuring himself that it really wasn’t as long as he made it sound, was as short as Lee herself was suggesting, “That’s what sensei said, at the very least, we’re expected to check in with Konoha in person every once in a while, so we can’t be gone too long.”

 

And yet… Aside from the chunin exams, he’d never left Konoha for that long before. More, he’d never left Konoha without Lee for that long before. Even now, even inside Konoha, he tried to remember if there’d been any time where they’d spent a significant time apart. He didn’t think there was, for better or worse, Lee had always been there.

 

“Yes, not that long,” Minato answered with a grin on his face, already read to be there and back again.

 

Next to him Haru sighed and gave Minato his own look, as if by his dull expression alone Minato should be embarrassed about something, but all Minato could ask was, “What?”

 

Haru looked at Minato, looked at Lee, then looked back again, finally he said, “You know, I hate to say this, but I think I kind of enjoyed being called Dead Last more than I like being a third wheel.”

 

“Third wheel?!” Minato spluttered but Haru was already putting down a bill and rising from his seat even as he gave them both a rather awkward smile, “I think I’d better go work on my tree walking, the nidaime says if I don’t get it by the end of the week then I will be hands down the most untalented ninja he’s ever seen in his life.”

 

“Dead Last, you are hands down the most untalented ninja that the nidaime’s probably ever seen,” Lee corrected Haru, to which she earned a rather miffed look and an entirely insincere, “Thanks, Lee, for clarifying that for me.”

 

And just like that he was walking back into the village, distinctive white hair visible long before he turned the corner towards the training grounds, leaving Minato and Lee to both stare dumbly after him.

 

“Man, I do not remember Dead Last having this much gumption when we first met,” Lee noted, not inaccurately either, as Haru had seemed too terrified of Lee (and even Minato now that Minato thought about it) to say anything one way or another towards them.

 

Apparently, that awe after the last mission from hell had worn off a bit, and now not only was Haru the voice of reason, he was the voice of very upset reason who was tired of being ignored all the time.

 

Minato just wished he wouldn’t go implying things like… Well… He glanced at Lee, she didn’t even seem to realize what Haru had gone implying, that he and Lee were on some kind of a date and Dead Last had been mistakenly invited along.

 

Which, he guessed he wasn’t opposed to dating Lee, but then he’d never really thought about dating anyone period. It just hadn’t been anything that crossed his mind, and if he had then there’d been the idle thought that no girl in the village would want to spend as much time with Lee as he did (except for maybe Uzumaki, but chances were Kushina would just use dating Minato as a means to somehow date her true target Lee).

 

So, it hadn’t really been anything he’d considered, but all the same that didn’t mean Haru could go around saying things like…

 

“It’s quiet,” Lee’s voice jarred Minato from his thoughts, she was looking out at the village, at the usual hustle and bustle of this more civilian sector of the village. However, despite all this, Minato could see what she meant.

 

After the ending of the chunin exams, Lee’s forced strange end that seemed to rewrite not simply memories but time itself, it was quiet. An eerie, forced, quiet that even now left him waiting for some unseen consequence waiting out of sight.

 

He glanced over at Lee, she was looking down now into her bowl, eyes dark an deep as they stared through the table into the past, red hair falling over her face and hiding her expression from view.

 

“Quiet is good, isn’t it?” Minato asked, and she grimaced, looked up and across at him.

 

“It’s…” she paused, trailed off, bit at her lower lip and looked towards the street again before looking back at Minato, “I know that I’ve done… things before, that no one else is capable of, I know. And I know that it should bother me more than it does but this time… This was different.”

 

“Yes,” Minato said slowly, “It was.”

 

She shook her head back and forth, as if Minato was missing the point, “I’ve never done anything like this before, Minato. Teleportation, clones, genjutsu, all of my jutsus, rising from the dead… That’s nothing compared to this.”

 

He considered that, considered everything he’d seen of her, and nodded slightly, “You’re right, this was different.”

 

“And it’s quiet,” Lee added quietly to Minato’s answer.

 

Lee could be at once overt and at times very subtle, she was so complicated at times, and it was because Minato had known her all of his life that he could look at her now and see through those words to their heart. Lee had the power to change the world, to rewrite anything and everything that could go wrong, to bring back the dead, and maybe even more than that. Lee, singlehandedly, could fix everything.

 

And yet…

 

“I won’t tell them,” Minato said, then reaching across the table and taking one of her hands in his, squeezing it, “Don’t tell them, Lee.”

 

“Isn’t it my job to keep the hokage, Jiraiya at least, informed about things like this?” Lee asked with a too wry smile that hid so much uncertainty.

 

“No, not about this,” Minato said shaking his head, “Just because you can solve our problems, just because you did last time… What would we become, Lee, if we only relied on you? What would you become?”

 

She opened her mouth but closed it again, clearly not having the words for what she’d become, for what Konoha would force her to become if it became all too clear what she was capable of.

 

“I want to live in a world where I can work to fix the problems we created, not just to step aside and have you fix them for us,” Minato said, “And it shouldn’t fall to you to fix everything for us either, because what kind of a life would that end up being? You should be the one deciding when, how, and where to act, not anyone else.”

 

“But what if I choose wrong?” Lee asked, desperately and earnestly, her pale hand still squeezing his. He wondered how many people had accused her of that, Jiraiya, the nidaime, or anyone else who had looked at any one of her disasters and started pointing fingers.

 

However, Minato was not one of them.

“You won’t,” Minato answered easily, with all the faith he’d ever had in Lee, “I know you Lee, and whatever you think, whatever choice you make, it won’t be the wrong one if it’s yours.”

 

Minato would trust her with this, as he’d always trusted her in everything else.

 

* * *

 

“I am sorry to put this on you, Lee,” Sakumo, Sakumo-shishou as of a few days ago, said with a truly apologetic grin as he appeared out of his bedroom dressed in ANBU tactical gear along with a few scrolls no doubt packed with necessary supplies, “But I don’t have time to schedule a D-rank, I have no idea how long I’ll be gone, and with Jiraiya leaving the country and any of my other friends god knows where…”

 

“It’s alright,” Lee said, although sitting in the Hatake’s kitchen at their small table, looking across at the bizarrely stoic three-year-old Kakashi, Lee was wondering if a good portion of her future apprentice ship wouldn’t be her roped into babysitting for her new master.

 

Judging by the grateful look on Sakumo’s face, and the rather resigned and bitter look on Kakashi’s (although it was a bit hard to tell since apparently, since the last time she’d seen him, he’d taken to wearing a cloth mask over his face), this was a somewhat routine thing.

 

But then, Lee supposed that this was what happened when you were an ANBU captain, particularly one of Hatake Sakumo’s caliber. You were called at a moments notice, leaving your apprentice, and toddler, behind.

 

“Thank you, Lee,” Sakumo said moving towards her and hugging her briefly, ignoring how Lee almost instinctively stiffened in his grasp, “He’ll be no trouble, I promise.”

 

He then pulled back, searched her face for something, and gave her a reassuring and kind smile, “I promise, when I get back, we’ll get to work. I didn’t want to give you too much after the chunin exams had just ended. It seems that’s backfired a bit, hasn’t it?”

 

Lee rubbed at the back of her head, sipped at the tea that Sakumo had so generously provided, “Well, as Jiraiya-sensei is fond of saying, there’s always taijutsu brat.”

 

Sakumo threw back his head and laughed, and Lee couldn’t help but notice how Kakashi’s eyes widened at the sight of it, but then the man ruffled her hair and said with a grin, “Yes, for you, there’s always taijutsu.”

 

He then turned towards his son, at the sight of the mask Sakumo sighed, raised his eyebrows, but then smiled as he moved forward to hug his son, “Be good for Lee, Kashi, I’ll be home soon.”

 

And just like that he was out the door, leaving Lee and three-year-old Kakashi behind in the kitchen. The silence, within seconds, was deafening. Lee, tapping her fingers against the wooden table, eventually broke it, “So, Kakashi…”

 

She then trailed off, trying to remember what she would have wanted to talk about when she was three. Well, she hadn’t had much of a social life, or a life period, back then. That had been prime cupboard time back in Surrey, then she’d been four and had barely spoken the local language at all. And then, well, she’d been in the academy and no longer three.

 

At any rate, Kakashi was years away from going into the academy at this point, so that line of questioning was out which left Lee asking about the weather or his health, and since neither of those were interesting she just blurted something equally mundane and harmless.

 

“What do you do for fun?”

 

Kakashi blinked at her, large gray eyes wide and somewhat alarmed, looking as if he wanted to sink even further into his mask and out of her sight. It’d only been a month or so since she’d seen him, but already he was much bigger than before, and apparently just as quiet.

 

“Right, well, personally I do ninjutsu for fun…” Lee trailed off, trying to think of anything else she did that might constitute a hobby, “I also write a lot of books in _English_ and now translate them into our language, but, well, I guess that’s not really a hobby anymore.”

 

Kakashi as perhaps expected, said nothing to this, just stared forward at her. Lee settled herself into staring right back, inwardly wondering exactly how long this was going to take, and if she shouldn’t relocate herself and Kakashi back to her own apartment in the meantime. Not that Mianto would be there, given he and Jiraiya were preparing for their journey of self-discovery all over the elemental nations, but then at least Lee would have her books to read or television to watch.

 

“Ninja don’t have fun.”

 

She started, saw Kakashi looking at her, his eyes narrowed somewhat as if he had decided that he was going to judge her.

 

“Huh?” Lee asked eloquently.

 

The boy continued, voice high and childish but filled with more confidence than any toddler deserved, “Ninja are very serious, they don’t have fun.”

 

“Really?” Lee asked, blinking slightly, “Where on earth did you hear something like that?”

“It’s the rules,” the boy said, and not with a shrug either, as if these were definitively the rules and Lee was a fool for not knowing them.

 

“The rules?” Lee couldn’t help but ask and with that Kakashi hopped down from the table with determination, moving his stubby little legs into his room and reappearing with a rather thick book for a three-year-old and shoving it towards her.

“The rules,” he insisted as he forced her to take it.

 

On the cover were the words, “The Shinobi Handbook,” and flipping through she felt something in her memory pinging, as if this was something she’d seen at some point, probably in the academy, but then had slept through or thrown out or just disregarded completely.

 

So, she said instead, as she flipped through chapters on stoicism, the seriousness of the shinobi profession, and more, “Ah, those rules.”

 

Kakashi nodded, as if pleased that Lee now had her memory jogged with the rules. However, Lee was not nearly so pleased as she continued flipping through, remembering just why she’d tossed this to the side. Actually, if she was remembering right, pretty much everyone had tossed this book to the side, even Minato who was certainly more about respecting academy teachers than she herself was had disregarded entire chapters of this thing.

 

Finally, she looked up from the text, and said, “You know these rules of yours are garbage, right?”

 

Kakashi bristled, eyebrows furrowing, face flushing, and looking as if he was on the verge of shouting at her that she had no idea what she was talking about.

 

“I’m not saying the stuff about chakra exercises, making traps, and what not isn’t useful,” Lee said, “Well, for some people, I never bothered to read it. But this stuff here about friendship and hobbies and everything…”

 

“What do you know?!” Kakashi asked, jumping with surpising quickness to take the book from Lee’s hands, but not quick enough as Lee merely moved it higher and pushed Kakashi back gently with one leg.

 

“Well, I was just promoted to chunin, and I was hands down the scariest damn genin this village has ever seen,” Lee had it on good authority that this last was true, “And I have been at this longer than you’ve been alive, so I think I know my shit.”

 

Kakashi didn’t look like he believed her, face red, eyes dark, and looking on the verge of stomping his feet so Lee decided a demonstration was in order. Without another word she teleported them out to her favorite training field, conveniently empty of other teams for the moment.

 

“How…” Kakashi asked, gripping her leg, apparently not having been in the know as far as Lee’s teleportation was concerned.

 

“I am the master of ninjutsu,” Lee explained, “Which of course, is why I can say on good authority, that your rules are garbage.”

 

Kakashi looked at her with wide eyes, watched as Lee, without moving a muscle or making any handseals whatsoever, created a great inferno that towered over the tallest trees in the village, “See that, guess what’s that fueled by?”

 

“Chakra?” Kakashi asked, very clearly alarmed and still clutching at the fabric of her pants.

 

“Well, if you want to be technical, then yes, but it’s also powered by friendship.”

 

“Friendship?!” Kakashi blurted.

 

“If it weren’t for my overpowering friendship with Minato,” Lee said, “Then I probably would still be at the Dursleys in a cupboard doing D-ranks for the rest of my life. So, in a very roundabout sense, all of my awesome jutsus are powered by friendship.”

 

Kakashi didn’t look as if he believed that, but didn’t say anything against it either, but did open his mouth in a cry of alarm as Lee opened his book and with a pen began to annotate her own rules, “As Sakumo-shishou’s beloved son, I am taking it upon myself to improve your education starting with giving you a new set of rules that you will do your best to follow or else face dire consequences. The first, all of your C-rank missions can and will somehow turn into A or S-ranked plant zombie bonanzas where you will either a) have to blow up inns, b) get fatally or near fatally stabbed, or c) have a variety of terrible things happen that you can never talk about because S-ranked secrets Lee.”

 

Kakashi jumped again, trying to grab the book out of her hand, only to be kicked back by Lee into a tree as Lee kept writing and talking, “The second, if anyone asks if you’re a god the answer is always yes. Otherwise, you’ll be attacked by giant marshmallow men and have no choice but to cross the beams which in turn could destroy reality as we know it.”

 

Groaning and sitting up, Kakashi blinked, then asked, “When will anyone ask if I’m a god?”

 

Lee dutifully ignored him as she continued with gusto, crossing out the original text here and there and overwriting it with her own wisdom, “The third, make sure that one person on your genin team is the reasonable one, the other is the overpowered one, and maybe try to get a medic-nin somewhere in that situation as without the medic-nin you will end up concussed at some point and still have to drag your ass through a labyrinth while carrying your completely useless (if reasonable) teammate.”

 

Kakashi braced himself and made another move for her, again very quick for someone not even in the academy, but certainly not fast enough for Lee who took the opportunity to jump up into the tree line, “The fourth, all of those things that everyone tells you are irrelevant, like your _English_ books and movies, are secretly very important and understanding them is the key to understanding life itself!”

 

Kakashi sprinted up the tree next to her, even while Lee jumped back down, “The fifth… I actually don’t have a fifth. Wait a minute, yes, I do have a fifth!”

 

She then pointed at Kakashi and his ridiculous mask, “If you wear a mask, and impersonate batman on a daily basis, people will make fun of you forever and you will never make any friends and be a sad lonely panda of a shinobi for the rest of your life. And nobody wants to be an Orochimaru.”

 

With that as Kakashi jumped after her she let him catch up, then used the opportunity to rip down his mask and then punt him into a small hole, there crossing her arms and closing the book she said, “Thus endeth the lesson.”

 

Man, Lee thought to herself, she was doing great at this babysitting thing, and here Jiraiya had always avoided team seven babysitting D-ranks if only so that Lee and Minato (but mostly Lee) wouldn’t corrupt the children.

 

Kakashi’s face was bright red, and he certainly wasn’t wearing an expression of gratitude as he struggled there, but all the same Lee took pity and quickly released him back from his hole and handed him his book with a grin.

 

“You ruined my book,” Kakashi said flatly, staring at the altered pages with a rather intense frown for a boy his age.

 

“I fixed your book,” Lee said, grin growing wider, “And the words you’re looking for are, ‘You’re welcome, Lee, I’m so glad you’ve given me all the helpful hints you would have wanted before I get skewered by plant zombies on my first mission.”

 

“Those aren’t the words I’m looking for,” Kakashi said with a pout even as he tucked the book under one arm.

 

Still, Lee’s eyes softened as they landed on Kakashi’s silver hair, so like his father’s, “You know, even Orochimaru has friends, I mean, sometimes… No one is an emotionless husk, we can’t afford to be, those are the ones that die the quickest.”

 

Kakashi flushed slightly, but seemed to relent somewhat as well, allowing his posture to soften ever so slightly as he watched Lee fix the training field with a wave of her hand. Then grabbing his, she prepared to teleport back to the Hatake compound but was interrupted by a voice.

 

“Lee!”

 

Lee looked up, there across from her, looking pale and almost alarmed at the sight of her was Uchiha Mikoto in her new chunin vest.

 

“Ah,” Lee started, not quite sure how to start a conversation given that the last time she’d seen Mikoto was in the fight that had become far too vicious far too quickly, “Hello.”

 

“I have the training field reserved so I…” Mikoto started, explaining her own presence and then stopped herself. She bowed slightly, face red, “I’m sorry.”

 

“Oh, that’s…” Lee started but Mikoto didn’t even give her a chance to get a word in edgewise.

 

“I went too far and we both know it and I am very sorry,” Mikoto then straightened, dark eyes burning, “And I’m glad you’re alright.”

 

“Well,” Lee’s hands wandered to her ribs, healed after a day in the hospital as well as Lee’s own use of ninjutsu, “It was a pretty nasty cut.”

 

Mikoto grimaced, glanced at Kakashi, then stepped forward, “I know, and like I said I am sorry but I… I wasn’t thinking about you, or I knew that if I was going to win… I had to go much further than I should.”

 

Mikoto then laughed bitterly, “And even then, I didn’t win, even after all of that.”

 

“Well, you came closer than anyone else did,” Lee gave Mikoto, but close apparently wasn’t good enough. Lee wondered, for a moment, if Mikoto remembered what had happened. Nobody but Minato had, but Lee had wondered if Mikoto’s sharingan which seemed so much more powerful than any other iteration…

 

But if Mikoto knew she didn’t say anything, just sighed and looked past Lee towards the hokage monument, and then finally said, “I thought, that if I could beat Fugaku, if I could beat you, then the clan might nominate me as clan-heir.”

 

Oh, clan politics, Lee probably should have guessed as everything Mikoto did seemed to revolve around the politics of her clan, but even so Lee couldn’t imagine being so invested the way Mikoto clearly was. As the orphan daughter of foreign civilians, Lee had never had these kinds of issues.

 

“They didn’t, of course, even when I’m a chunin and have the… Well, even after everything, it’s still not enough. I’m still even engaged to Fugaku, though I imagine if he doesn’t pass the next chunin exams they may give that particular honor to someone else,” she laughed again and then looked down at her vest, “Still, at least I’m a chunin, and that’s further than anyone ever thought I would get.”

 

Lee supposed she should be upset, and a part of her was, that Mikoto had gone as far as a plant zombie had, but all she could say was, “Well, if you try the same thing in the jonin exams I can’t promise to be lenient.”

 

Then, as Mikoto smiled with relief as well as those seeds of friendship that Kakashi so dutifully disregarded, Lee took his hand and pulled him past her, “Come on Kakashi, I think it’s a great day for you and I to play a bit of shogi and try to contemplate the meaning of life.”

 

* * *

 

There was a summer thunderstorm, the day of Uzumaki Mito’s funeral, but few were in attendance and it had been a very private thing, Aunt Mito’s wish told to Kushina as well as Uncle Hashirama and Tobirama.

 

The hokage, the shodaime, nidaime, Kushina, Tsunade, and then the few remaining friends that Mito had had among the living had shown up and now it was only Kushina and the former hokages who remained. Kushina, dressed in her chunin vest and mission clothing just like Mito had asked for, could only stare flatly at the grave resting among the many other Senju graves.

 

No other Uzumaki though, not here, and not anywhere else either. In Uzushio, there had been no one left to bury the dead.

 

In her stomach, Kushina felt the demon fox bristle, fire licking at her own chakra. A hand fell on her shoulder, she looked up to see Hashirama staring down at her, rain pouring down his face that could so easily be mixed in with his own tears.

 

He must have known, he must have known that Mito was waiting for Kushina to take the exams and become a chunin. He must have known that it was so very unlikely for Mito, tethered to the fox for so many years, would survive the transfer. He’d never said anything, not once, and even now he didn’t say anything to Kushina.

 

Just looked at her, with that sad, soft smile.

 

Kushina gritted her teeth, trying to choke down a sob, trying not to think that it was because of her that Tsuande-sama was now drinking in a bar again thinking of her dead grandmother, that the nidaime’s face was so dark and stoic as he stared forward at the grave, that the shodaime was…

 

“She was very tired,” Hashirama said, so much quieter than he usually said anything, “And she was glad to see me and Tobi again, glad to teach you, but she was… Mito was very tired.”

 

“Does that make it better?” Kushina asked, voice hitching.

 

“No,” Tobirama said, “But at the very least, perhaps in the pure world, it means that she will see the Uzumaki again.”

 

The Uzumaki, Kushina’s own family, now gone from this world with no one but Kushina to remember them… Still, Kushina shook her head, “I wish…”

 

“I know,” Hashirama said quietly, and it struck Kushina then that he must feel so much worse than her, because to her Mito had been the last of her family, her mentor, but she was Hashirama’s wife.

 

Lee looked towards the grave, this flat gray stone with her name written on it, looking so different than the vibrant Mito had in real life. Then, slowly, Kushina felt the words she hadn’t wanted to say but needed to say tumble out of her mouth, “You could ask Lee, we could as Lee and I’m sure…”

 

Hashirama cut her off, and Kushina realized that he’d thought of this himself, probably long before Kushina herself had, “I wouldn’t take Mito from her family and I can’t ask something like that from Lee. It was nice, to see Mito and the village again, to see Tobi again, but Mito let go of me and I have no right to not do the same.”

 

Still, Kushina wondered, how much of the water rolling down his cheeks was from the rain, and how much of it was his own tears.

 

* * *

 

“I came to drop off some of Minato’s translations,” Lee announced as she walked into the Senju compound, arms filled with Minato’s final translating efforts in the week since they’d been back, “He didn’t think he’d have much time to get the rest done, what with him and Jiraiya-sensei leaving.”

 

The nidaime simply nodded wordlessly, took the books from her, and Lee then noted his rather somber expression, and more, wearing clothing that signified a period of grieving.

 

“Mito died,” he said, his voice slightly raw at the edges, and Lee felt her eyes widen as she realized that the woman’s chakra was conspiculous absent (although, oddly enough, that heavy, ever-present feeling of rage that was the fox tumor, remained.)

 

“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t…”  


“It was a small funeral,” the nidaime interjected with a soft smile, “She hated large overly grand affairs.”

 

“Still,” Lee said, grimacing and wishing she had brought something or had something more to say, “I’m sorry.”

 

“She was ready,” the nidaime said, an amused quirk to his lips, as if even now he found Lee’s antics entertaining despite himself, “She had more than prepared herself, and I think… I think she was ready.”

 

Lee had nothing to say to that, would not ask if Senju Tobirama had been ready or his brother had, or if he wished that Mito hadn’t been ready. She wondered, instead, if he would ask her to bring her back… He didn’t, they both knew he could, and that perhaps Lee would and should but… But he didn’t.

 

Lee nodded, bowed, was about to exit when the man stopped her, “Your English nin would like a word.”

 

Lee felt her eyebrows raised as the nidaime shrugged, “The man becomes unbearably obnoxious when denied for too long.”  


“Did he say why?” Lee asked and here the nidaime’s reluctant and derisive smile grew.

 

“Oh, I imagine he’ll try to use you to get back to his own village. He has already piqued my brother’s interest, and I can’t say that I’m unaffected either.”

 

Lee grimaced at the words, as England was the last thing she wanted anyone interested, but none the less offered the nidaime another shorter bow and then let herself be led into the compound’s tea-room where, looking as local as anyone in traditional clothing that must have been purchased for him at some point, was none other than her friend the English shinobi.

 

At her entrance his eyes flicked up, that startling burning blue that was rather like Minato’s eye color if she thought about it, and his lips twisted upwards into an almost Orochimaru-esque smirk.

 

Lee sighed, spared a glance for the nidaime, who merely settled himself down at the table with her apparently willing to listen to her and the foreigner blather in English with half an ear.

 

“ _So,_ ” Lee started, deciding to cut straight to the point, “ _You wanted to talk?_ ”

 

He smiled, a charming thing, and said, “ _I believe congratulations are in order, I hear you passed your exam._ ”

 

Lee nodded, it’d after all never really been in doubt, well except for that final round that had spiraled out of control, but Lee was really trying not to think about that too much. Something about Lee’s blasé attitude seemed to irk the man, but he said nothing, and soon enough he was all smiles again.

 

“ _I just thought I’d ask, since we didn’t get much of a chance to talk last time, about England again._ ”

 

“ _I figured as much,_ ” Lee said, and not without bitterness either, as it really was the last thing she’d want to spend her time talking about.

 

“ _I just wondered, you said you’re an orphan?_ ” except something about the way he asked made Lee think that he knew she was an orphan, knew very well, and hadn’t simply been told by Lee or anyone else either, “ _I’m rather familiar with the English clans and I was wondering who raised you before you came to_ Konoha _._ ”

 

“ _Clans?_ ”  Lee asked with raised eyebrows, “ _I don’t know who you’ve been talking to but there aren’t anything like clans in England, at least not any that I’ve seen._ ”

 

“ _Of course there are…_ ” the man started, looking somewhat insulted that Lee was brushing off the existence of clans, let alone shinobi, in England.

 

“ _Look, I was there for four years, and I never saw a single_ shinobi _in Surrey,_ ” she said, “ _And if you’re talking about my relatives, my clan, then they were as civilian as civilian come. In fact, they were so in love with being civilians that the very idea of magic or_ ninjutsu _terrified the living hell out of them._ ”

 

The very word, magic, had in fact been forbidden for as long as Lee could remember.

 

However, judging by the shocked look on Ren the ninja’s face, Lee had just handed him a very important, and very surprising, piece of information, “ _Oh my god, they left you with muggles._ ”

 

“ _That… is not the word I would have used for civilian,_ ” Lee finished lamely, wondering why he felt the need to make up words when civilian by itself was a perfectly good one in English, “ _Either way, I really don’t care about England and…_ ”

 

He leaned forward and cut her off, “ _Why are you so insistent on believing that England will never come into your life again? Trust me, you are… Far more important than you think, and one way or another, our tiny dark island of a nation will come for you._ ”

 

Lee burst into laughter, pounding on the table in hysterics under the nidaime’s raised eyebrows and the insulted look on Ren’s face, “ _Oh, oh god, that… The very idea. Oh man, that’ll be the day. Me having to go to England, you’re hilarious._ ”

 

And with that she drained the last of the tea, stood and gave a final bow to the nidaime even as she still grinned and stifled chuckles, “With that, I think I’ve had about as much of the mother country as I can handle. Thanks for the tea, nidaime-sama.”

 

* * *

 

Lee, Jiraiya, and Minato stood by the gates to the village. Jiraiya politely looking out towards the horizon as Lee and Minato said goodbye.

“So, this is it then?” Lee asked, looking out onto the road which lead out of Konoha and the rest of fire country.

 

“Just for now,” Minato said before smiling and adding, “Not that long at all, if you think about it.”

 

“You’ll have to tell me about all the hookers sensei brings back to the hotel rooms,” Lee said, motioning towards Jiraiya, who only winked and grinned at them, not even having the decency to look the least bit ashamed.

 

Suddenly, Minato realized he’d be seeing a lot of prostitutes in the coming months.

 

“Well, I’ll probably leave out some details,” Minato said, flushing, and then smiling as Lee laughed at his face.

 

“And I’ll tell you about everything here and all the missions that go terribly wrong,” Lee said with her own too wide grin.

 

“Oh, now why do you say that?” Minato asked, “Just because all our missions so far have ended in disaster doesn’t mean your next will.”

 

Lee didn’t answer, didn’t need to, just pulled him forward and hugged him for a moment before releasing him, then grinning and waiving towards Jiraiya-sensei. Then, just like that, with Lee waiving even with their backs turned, Jiraiya and Minato walked out of the village and into the great unknown.


	26. The Calm Before Many Storms

_In which Minato learns all about sex, the English shinobi throws a temper tantrum, Lee takes her various babysitting duties perhaps too seriously, and somewhere in England it’s October 31, 1994 and an unexpected name has come out of the Goblet of Fire._

 

* * *

 

“Dear Lee,”

 

Minato started writing and then stopped, sighing, and trying to think of the right words. Glancing up he took in this mostly empty civilian bar in the Land of Rice, only Minato and a few truly alcoholic men slumped over the counter and few tables still present, of them only Minato and the bartender were at all sober.

 

Outside it was raining heavily, that cold late autumn dredge that signaled the ending of fall and beginning of winter, in other words weather that hardly tempted Minato to linger outside of the inn he and Jiraiya had holed themselves in for the night.

 

And as always, when Jiraiya managed to pick up one or even two large breasted women for information and pleasure and Minato was thrown out of the room or else just fled it for his own sanity, he took a moment or two to write something, anything, to Lee back in Konoha.

 

Even if he had seen her only a month or so ago and would be seeing her again shortly as Jiraiya and he made it back to the village before any early winter storms could set in. Then it’d be a few short missions, training inside the village, and the jonin exams around the corner.

 

It felt like he and Lee had become chunin almost yesterday and yet here he was fourteen, fifteen in December, and likely almost done with his apprenticeship after little more than a year.

 

And even with all of that, sitting here chewing on the end of his pen, he still couldn’t think quite what he wanted to say.

 

Well, there was nothing if not the present moment, “Jiraiya’s taken it upon himself to build my character again by kicking me out of the inn room and having me use my learned ninja skills to make camp for the night. Perhaps an admirable goal if I wasn’t being replaced by a truly large breasted woman who has had perhaps a tad too much to drink and whose choices I’m really questioning…”

 

This time Jiraiya had wasted no time on getting rid of Minato. To a civilian woman like this one, fourteen-year-old Minato had looked more like Jiraiya’s younger brother or even his son than a colleague and student, and thus the idea of getting it on with Jiraiya-sensei while Minato was even remotely in the vicinity had clearly been off putting to the woman for all that she appeared to appreciate sensei’s brash charm.

 

All the same, Minato was predicting a truly awkward awakening in the morning. Or maybe he was just vindictively hoping for it, not that any awkward morning had ever managed to change Jiraiya’s behavior.

 

“Still, none of this is exactly new and at this point I think I’m more resigned to it than anything else. For all that I’ve learned the finer points of fuinjutsu, taijutsu, and ninjutsu from sensei I’m wondering if you didn’t get a far better deal with your own apprenticeship.”

 

Not that Minato had seen much of Hatake Sakumo since he’d started his apprenticeship, as it seemed that whenever Minato happened to be back in Konoha Hatake was out on some mission or another. Still, from what Lee wrote and what he’d seen they got along very well, better even than Minato and Jiraiya. Which, for all that the man was the closest thing to a father or older brother that Minato had, and for all that Minato respected him, it was sometimes hard to remember that when he spent half the time in every random village in the country picking up women.

 

Of course, with that realization Minato quickly added another line to the letter, “Well, that is, if your own master was around more. I know that for all that I complain, at least I do see a lot of Jiraiya, maybe too much of Jiraiya.”

 

The brief trips to Konoha were hard, in a way, because of that. They were his few chances to not just be Jiraiya’s apprentice, learning about intelligence and many techniques besides, but to see and talk to people face to face that he rarely got to anymore. From his old academy friends, to his old teammates, and even chronic menaces like Uzumaki.

 

And Lee, it was always good to see Lee in person.

 

Each time he saw her he felt like it had been ages rather than a month or so, like she kept getting taller, her hair longer, or her body shape just changing so that she looked so familiar and yet so different whenever Minato got back. He wondered if it was the same for her…

 

And on that note, he felt himself flushing as he realized, yet again, that even more than learning ninja techniques and perfecting his craft, his apprenticeship with Jiraiya had perhaps been something of a journey of self-discovery. Because, as it turned out, you couldn’t be Jiraiya’s student and not directly confront your sexuality if only because Jiraiya-sensei insisted on stopping at every hot spring for research, hitting on every woman in every bar, and slowing down at every corner where a provocatively dressed woman awaited.

 

Not to mention that Jiraiya, now that Minato was in the throes of delightful puberty rather than just adolescence, had taken it upon himself to enlighten Minato to the wonders of women. Their eyes, their illusion of demure sweetness that could at once turn into the wrath of a fire breathing dragon that could crush you like a bug, their fine legs, and of course the heavenly roundness of their hips and breasts. Especially their breasts, which Jiraiya often, in thirty-minute rants, would liken to pillars of heaven while his hands would reach out and clench and unclench around the imaginary breasts of some unnamed giggling woman while blood poured out of his nose.

 

Point being, Minato had now been more than introduced to the glorious female anatomy in probably the worst way imaginable and was now in the truly delightful position of being able to apply his newfound knowledge to people he knew and loved.

 

Say, for instance, Lee, who while she lacked Jiraiya’s standard breast size, more than made up for it with her thin waist, lithe and deceptively willowy figure, and the delicate and defined nature of her features.

 

And her hair, there was something about that shade of red that just…

 

Of course, needless to say, Minato was writing none of that down on any piece of paper. So instead, flushing, and trying to think of something else, anything else, he wrote, “I’d tell you specifically what I’m working on, but I feel that’s best told in person rather than by a letter. That should be soon enough though, sensei wants to get back before the heavy rain out there turns into snow. So, without talking about any of my projects, I suppose that’s all I really have to say until I can see you in person.”

 

It was something of a lame letter, one of the less interesting he’d sent, no anecdotes today about people or places that Lee had probably never seen or even some of his own daily adventures with Jiraiya…

 

Still, something about the idea of being home soon made him itch, too restless to settle for writing a letter when so soon he could just go and say it in person. So, all he could do was roll up the scroll for now and sigh, glancing out the window at the rain and wondering if sensei considered his latest dalliance worth it.

 

Probably, Jiraiya, Minato had learned, at least as far as sex was concerned, was rarely a man for regret.

 

“It’ll be nice going home again,” Minato said to himself instead, contenting himself with those words said to no one in this empty civilian bar inside an inn in the middle of nowhere.

 

* * *

 

As was Lee’s usual routine when Sakumo-shishou was out doing ANBU work and she herself was not on some C-ranked or B-ranked mission on another team in the meantime, Lee found herself on her regular joint D-rank duty of continuing the nidaime and company’s English education and keeping an eye on Kakashi.

 

Granted, the keeping an eye on Kakashi was hardly a prescribed mission at this point, there was no pay for it, especially since five-year-old Kakashi was now in the academy (and progressing through the curriculum at a truly alarming rate), but still Lee had made a promise to Sakumo and since the man seemed to like the idea of Lee babysitting Kakashi then babysit Kakashi Lee would.

 

And if babysitting meant dragging Kakashi through the village when he finished the academy for the day to do all the stuff Lee needed to do, well then, that wasn’t Lee’s problem.

 

Kakashi like usual, was pouting at the table, holding a cup of tea kindly provided by the shodaime. Clearly, he was still deciding if he was upset at being pushed around, upset that Lee had burned all his masks, or upset that all his ninja idols broke all his dumb shinobi rules without any shame whatsoever and that Lee had been right the whole time and that the only truly stoic ninja was a dead one.

 

That, or he was upset that he was sitting next to loud and terrifying Uzumaki Kushina, who was even now swirling her tea as she waited for Lee’s English lecture to get somewhere interesting.

 

Next to Uzumaki was Dead Last, looking as white haired, dark eyed, and as exhausted as ever. Dead Last, who, by the honor of having been drafted into being the nidaime’s hopeless genin apprentice, had also been drafted into English lessons (and, as to be expected, was doing rather pitifully, not to be helped by the fact that he was months behind the rest of the gang by the time he first started showing up to these).

 

Right now, he looked like he was trying to pretend he was secretly some place else or that he secretly knew English at least as well as Uzumaki if not the nidaime (who after a year or so had become proficient basically to the point of fluency) or even the shodaiem who wasn’t half bad.

 

Across from them sat the two legendary brothers themselves, Senju Hashirama with that glimmer of delight and excitement and Senju Tobirama with that slight impatience, and with them, one of the newer additions to these things, the English shinobi himself.

 

Lee had not been thrilled when he’d started showing his face to these things.

 

Of course, apparently the nidaime had gotten tired of locking him away in his room and didn’t fully trust Lee’s translations and impressions (whatever the hell that was supposed to mean) so at some point a few months in the man had been invited along. Chakra still sealed off and still hopelessly angry but seeming to compete with the nidaime for fluency in the language of the elemental nations as well as fight for control over his own life and situation. Granted, he tried to be subtle and sly about it, but when your chakra was cut off and you’d been stuck under house arrest for more than a year, it tended to make you desperate and obvious even to an academy student. He’d take any and every opportunity to win over friends or divulge information that would pique interest and get him back to the motherland.

 

That or he would get so angry at whatever Lee happened to be saying (which was always the truth and he knew it) about anything that he’d inevitably throw some giant hissy fit where the nidaime would start taking extensive notes.

 

And the place where Uzumaki Mito would have been sitting remained dreadfully and horribly empty. Lee, as always, tried not to glance at the glaringly empty spot.

 

With a calm and authoritative voice Lee concluded her lesson in English, “ _And so you see, that’s why ‘Predator’ is a great movie that has significant bearing on all of our lives as well as English-speaking culture._ ”

 

Written on the board, behind her, naturally was the famous command from Schwarzenegger to his comrades to, “ _Get to the chopper!_ ”

 

(If Lee was being entirely honest she’d really run out of lesson plans a few weeks ago when she’d realized that the shodaime, nidaime, Uzumaki, and even Kakashi by just being in the same room long enough were all pretty damn good at this and hardly needed Lee to go over grammar, tenses, spelling, and what have you these days.

 

Well, Dead Last did, but Lee was not going to stylize her lessons towards the weakest link.)

 

Predictably, Dead Last slumped forward and sighed, asking, “Could you repeat all of that not in _English_?”

 

Also predictably, Ren had been staring at her for the past ten minutes with his jaw hanging open, like she was some kind of alien that he just simply could not comprehend and finally said (also in clear, annunciated English that would be well at home on Masterpiece theater), “ _Are you serious? ‘Predator’, your idea of the necessities of English culture, is the American muggle film ‘Predator’?!_ ”

 

“ _Can I help it that you don’t have taste, Ren?_ ” Lee asked, having been through this song and dance more than enough times to be tired of it. You think that he’d get tired of it as well, but no, he always came back for more, every single time.

 

Lee saw the nidaime, not even surreptitiously but right out in the open, get out a fresh page of paper and a brush and begin writing as the English nin’s rant began to accelerate.

 

“ _You can help the fact that you know nothing about your own people!_ ” the man said, not slamming his hand on the table or anything uncouth like that but simmering with a quiet rage and killing intent that would have been intimidating if his chakra hadn’t been sealed off by the nidaime himself as well as Uzumaki Mito, the last of the great Uzumaki fuinjutsu masters.

 

Dead Last, flushing awkwardly and cringing again asked, “Hey, Lee, I really can’t follow a word of this so if you could just…”

 

“ _Look, I say what I know_ ,” Lee interjected with a hapless shrug, as if to convey there wasn’t much she could do about it, “ _And as far as I know, England was filled with overweight civilians in suburbs and not a_ shinobi _in sight._ ”

 

“ _You say what you know,_ ” the man sneered, something at once reminiscent of Orochimaru, if Orochimaru were only slightly more suave and intellectual than reclusive and snake-like, “ _You were four, and raised by filthy muggles…_ ”

 

Lee scoffed and interrupted him, correcting his terms for him, “ _Fat civilians, please, muggle sounds like some experimental breeding between a dog and a hamster._ ”

 

The English shinobi apparently was irate enough to let that pass by as he continued, with far too much passion for any conversation about the motherland, “ _The point is the fact that you consider yourself some kind of an expert on English culture, when by all rights you never even saw what constitutes your culture, would be laughable if it weren’t so damned infuriating._ ”

 

Dead Last’s look of despair became a tad more irritated as he spoke slightly louder, an effort to get his voice herd amidst the brewing argument, “Seriously, Lee, if you keep doing this I’m not going to pick up any of this and…”

 

“Shhh, Dead Last,” Kushina interjected, placing a hand on his shoulder and ignoring his glare of irritation, “It’s just getting good, I’ll translate for you later after they stop talking smack.”

 

Kakashi sipped at his tea, watching the argument as if watching a ping pong match, large gray eyes wide as they moved from the English nin, to Lee, and then back again.

 

And as always, Lee decided to go ahead and use the big guns, “ _Alright, exorcist, let’s say, for argument’s sake, that there was a fully functional hidden village somewhere in Great Britain. Let’s say that they call themselves wizards and witches and do whatever the hell it is a witch and or wizard would even do. Now, picture Lee Eru in Surrey, living in her hopelessly civilian relative’s cupboard with an unbelievable raw talent in_ ninjutsu _. If you’re any kind of competent_ shinobi _, do you leave someone with this kind of potential to their own devices so that they immigrate to a foreign village?_ ”

The man gritted his teeth, as always twitching at her very valid point, before saying, “ _I did not say that England is a land without… issues. Yours was not a unique situation and is a known, and very controversial issue, though why you specifically would be in that situation is entirely beyond me._ ”

Lee crossed her arms and sighed, “ _What’s that supposed to mean?_ ”

 

He gave her a rather mocking look, as if he could not quite believe she was so dumb that he needed to spell it out for her, “ _It means, Lee, that you are the clan heir and last surviving member of a very wealthy, very old, and very powerful English clan. You, above all others, should not have been left to the care of your abusive civilian relatives._ ”

 

Then, in full lecture mode, he added, “ _It is English policy to not contact potential witches and wizards… shinobi I suppose you might say, born to or living with civilian families, until they are old enough to enter the English academy. In England, this is eleven, and until then the English village does its due diligence to see that its existence remains entirely secret from civilians. Although, to be fair, this was a policy I vehemently disagree with and sought to overturn with the success of my own revolution._ ”

 

Lee paused, just gave him a dull and questioning look of her own, and then said, “ _That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. If the civilians don’t know you exist then how the hell does the village receive any kind of funding?_ ”

 

“ _That policy I actually happen to agree with,_ ” the man said, the words weighted somehow as if they meant something far more to him, before sighing and stating, “ _The village, as you call it, receives money the same way any government does. Through the sale of goods and services, the difference being that not every witch or wizard is a trained mercenary. Unlike you, we do not need muggles or muggle funding._ ”

 

Which was something he’d implied if not outright said before, that aside from the odd professional exorcist revolutionaries like himself, there were English shinobi who were bakers, pub owners, book sellers, lawyers, bureaucrats, and well, just about anything but a shinobi.

 

That the very idea of every shinobi being trained to be, well, a shinobi was one that mildly disgusted him and offended his sensibilities.

 

Except that he himself, for all of his very civilian qualities, did give off many of the red warning flags of being a shinobi. Or at least, a very good self-trained shinobi, one who specialized in infiltration and seduction if not fuinjutsu and ninjutsu besides.

 

At any rate, as always, Lee had to end with, “ _That sounds entirely dumb and boring and no wonder you made it your mission in life to topple their government. Also, I still don’t believe you.”_

Now he slammed his hand down on the table, leaning forward, and hissing, “ _I don’t care if you believe me you goddamn overpowered brat! So long as someone in your bloodthirsty government does and I go home you can stick your head as far into the sand as you want and…_ ”

 

And it was at this point, as always, that Lee officially lost interest. She glanced over at Kakashi, nodding her head and switching back to her adopted tongue, “I think that’s a wrap, Kashi, you ready to blow this popsicle stand?”

 

Kakashi vigorously and silently nodded, clearly more than ready to move on to the next task of the day (he probably would have run away sooner if he didn’t know that Lee could so easily track him down).

 

“Don’t ignore me!” Ren the English nin switched languages as well, now standing up, chakra simmering and broiling beneath the nidaime’s seals to the point where if he had any control over it Lee would probably be on fire right now.

 

But he didn’t, so Lee just raised her eyebrows slightly, which only made him fume harder and step closer. Lee, without a hint of hesitation, batted him through the wall where he lay in a groaning sprawl on the floor.

 

“Do you want me to come back tomorrow?” Lee then asked the nidaime but he only raised his eyebrows as if to ask if she had anything better to do until another mission worth taking showed up or Sakumo-shishou returned back from his latest mission.

 

So she just nodded, took Kakashi’s hand in hers, and started to move along.

 

“Hey, Lee, wait up!” Lee stopped, looked back over her shoulder to see a grinning Uzumaki walking up while dragging an unenthused Dead Last behind her, “You still have a bit, right?”

 

“Well, I was going to drop in on the Uchiha compound today,” Lee said, ignoring Kakashi’s look of alarm as “I” in this case translated to “We” which meant he’d be tagging along uninvited to the Uchiha compound.

 

“Oh, Mikoto’s gonna love that,” Kushina said with her somehow fox and shark like grin that implied that Uchiha Mikoto would love anything but that. Which was probably true as the girl never seemed entirely happy to see Lee whenever Lee dropped in unannounced and uninvited.

 

Apparently, with the Uchiha, that simply was not done.

 

“Yes, well, it’s not really about what Uchiha Mikoto wants,” Lee said even as she started walking, fixing the wall back up with a wave of her hand even while she nodded in departure towards the Senju brothers, “It’s about what’s good for humanity.”

 

“Hey, I’m not complaining,” Kushina said as she put her hands into her own pockets, “Personally, I’m all for the Leeification of Konoha, and if any broody clan needs a makeover it’s them and the Hyugas. That said, if you have a half-hour to spare for ramen then me and Dead Last are more than up for it.”

 

Dead Last did not look more than up for it, but since his apprenticeship had more or less slammed him in close quarters with Uzumaki, he appeared to realize that resistance was hopelessly futile.

 

Kakashi, quiet as ever, just looked up at white haired defeated Dead Last and had the look of horror as if he was only just now realizing he was helplessly staring into his own future.

 

Lee for her own part, considered her options, the early afternoon, and the fact that if she didn’t have time for ramen she could damn well make time, “Well, I’m never not up for ramen.”

 

* * *

 

If Haru thought, more than once, that sometimes being on the same team or just in the vicinity of Lee and Minato was somewhat like being pulled awkwardly into the middle of their date then oddly enough being pulled into eating ramen with Kushina and Lee often left him with a slightly similar feeling.

 

Except, where Minato and Lee smiling at each other, speaking secret languages, or even just kicking the shit out of each other always seemed charged with unspoken subtext of some kind or another it felt like Uzumaki Kushina kept wanting there to be subtext of some kind and there… Well… Not being.

 

Or Haru could be completely wrong and inviting Lee out for ramen just about every three days (and sometimes pulling unfortunate Haru and Hatake Kakashi along for the ride), was just about being friends or girl power or a totally platonic crush on the oblivious death machine that was Eru Lee.

 

Still, it was days like this that he missed Minato, and that just said oh so much about everything.

 

“Oh man, ramen is the greatest, believe it,” Kushina said happily over her third bowl of miso ramen, “I think I just might die if this place ever goes out of business.”

 

Lee only nodded, more intent on finishing her own bowl then looking back towards the grinning Uzumaki Kushina. God, Haru wished he could be almost anywhere else right now. He would too, except Uzumaki always dragged him to these things and usually made it a point to make his life hell if he even thought of trying to escape.

 

And, Haru knew perfectly well, that Uzumaki had more than earned her chunin vest.

 

Still, he thought, at least Lee’s master’s kid was here to suffer with him. Haru didn’t know Hatake Kakashi all that well, mostly caught glimpses from Lee dragging him everywhere after the academy let out (although why he was in the academy at the alarming age of four or maybe five was kind of beyond Haru) but it was still nice to have what he assumed was a sane and rational comrade to join in the awkwardness of this situation.

 

Even if the kid was pointedly looking anywhere but at him.

 

“Hey, Lee, you’re competing in the jonin exams in the Spring, right?” Kushina asked, but by the tone of her words it was hardly a real question. The idea that Lee had put off her jonin exams this far, to work with Hatake, was actually a little baffling to Haru.

 

Sure, there was more to being a jonin than raw power, but all the same it was Lee and well… Well, with further training and refinement, Lee appeared to have gotten even more terrifying. He’d been on a mission she led (and god, Lee with authority, Lee with a chunin’s vest and authority over him) a while ago and well… Well, Haru had almost felt bad for the bandits they ran down, almost.

 

Lee just nodded, very nonchalantly as if the jonin exams were just another step on her humdrum journey to becoming one of the most terrifying shinobi to have ever existed, “Shishou and I don’t see much point in putting it off longer than that, Minato’s coming back for it too.”

 

Kushina smiled, “Ah yes, flakey bastard, he may have made me eat dirt at the chunin exams, but you can bet your ass I will get him back this time. Believe it!”

 

“If you say so,” Lee said with a shrug, apparently still not willing to put money down against Minato despite Kushina’s truly terrifying skillset and the demon fox in her stomach that had also made her twelve times scarier than she’d been before.

 

“I do say so,” Kushina said smugly, “Even if our blonde princess has been training in the mountains with bears he still won’t match up to my amazing prowess.”

 

“So, is the Uzumaki-Namikaze rivalry back on?” Haru couldn’t help but ask but by the look Kushina gave him it had never been off in the first place and certainly never would be.

 

Great, that would be delightful.

 

“And Dead Last, you’re trying round three for the chunin exams?” Lee asked, putting it out there in the open for everyone to hear. Haru wanted to sink into the counter and die.

 

Of course, not being promoted your first time in the exams was pretty normal, of all the genin to take the exams that first time only four had actually gotten the promotion (though that they had all been rookies was considered pretty odd, but then since it was Uzumaki Kushina, Uchiha Mikoto, Eru Lee, and Namikaze Minato, well, it started to look a little less weird.)

 

Even not being promoted your second time wasn’t too odd or alarming, there had been plenty of second time teams taking the exams both Haru’s first and second time through. Although some older teams were those who had just delayed taking it for a few years but that wasn’t so bad either.

 

However, after the third time…

 

“I’m sure you’ll be able to kick ten-year-old asses,” Lee reassured him, patting him on the back for comfort, though a little too roughly so as to bump him into the counter. That was another thing, there had been tension lately in the country, and with it the academy curriculum had subtly shifted graduation to younger and younger students.

 

So, where Haru had been scraping into a genin team at twelve, these kids were graduating at ten, nine, and eight. Meaning that Haru, at fifteen, was starting to look desperately old.

 

“Well, you know, Tobirama-shishou insists,” Haru said, as the man had said when the chunin exams had come around last year that given the fact that Harun now had the rinnegan it was downright embarrassing for him to not make at least chunin.

 

And true, Haru wasn’t what he had been, he was better and was now at least a decent genin if not chunin leveled, but when you were constantly compared to the likes of Eru Lee and Namikaze Minato…

 

“On the upside, if you don’t pass then you might get to take it next year with Kakashi,” Lee noted, “Plus, then it will probably be in Konoha and I can actually watch the whole thing.”

 

“Wait, what?” Haru stopped, looked over at Lee in horror then down at the blinking, tiny, Hatake Kakashi.

 

“Kashi’s on the fast track to graduate, apparently he was so scarily competent that when they got him in there they immediately bumped him up to the final year and Spring graduation.”

 

Haru almost fell out of seat, motioned to the truly tiny and adorable boy next to him, “But he’s five!”

 

Kakashi looked mildly insulted by this, pouting and poking at his empty bowl with a wooden chopstick, eyes narrowed, and still pointedly looking anywhere but at Haru. Dead Last, even compared to genius five-year-olds.

 

“Six in September,” Kakashi corrected, meaning that after he graduated top of his class, right around when he was taking the chunin exams, he’d be the same age as Haru had been when he’d entered the goddamn academy.

 

“I have to pass this time,” Haru said, head thunking on the table, trying to control his shuddering.

 

This time, this time was the big one, if he didn’t pass this time he’d just have to tell the nidaime that the magical giant peach had given the rinnegan to the wrong person and he was just going to go and join the genin corps like a good talentless shinobi.

 

“Kashi, don’t trample on Dead Last’s delicate feelings,” Lee chided, whacking Kakashi across the back of his head, “He’s like a delicate flower when it comes to his own lack of talent.”

 

“Lee, please don’t defend my honor,” Haru begged, lifting his head from the table even as Kushina burst out into laughter at his misery, entertained as every by Lee’s thoughtless callousness.

 

“He should at least recognize it!” Kakashi said back, rubbing the back of his head with a frown.

“Oh, believe me, Dead Last is perfectly aware that he’s Dead Last, the universe will never let him forget it,” Lee said, apparently substituting herself for the universe as she was the one who usually went out of her way to remind Haru of his standing in the academy and on team seven, “But that said, there’s a difference between subtly reminding him and then rubbing his face in the dirt.”

 

Kakashi crossed his arms, apparently done with this argument, and probably would have gotten away with it if Lee hadn’t used his lack of attention against him to throw a book at his head. Haru looked over, reading the words, “The Shinobi Handbook” on the front.

 

“Oh, hey, I remember that book,” Haru said to himself, it’d been pretty helpful to him at least, early on in the academy even if some of it had been incredibly intimidating and had made him wonder if he was really cut out for this shinobi business.

 

“Remember your rules, Kashi, we’ve been working on this,” Lee chided, only for Kakashi to flush and jump off his feet, throwing the book at Lee’s head only for her to catch it without even looking.

 

“They’re not my rules, they’re your dumb rules that don’t make any sense!”

 

“You’re breaking rule number sixteen,” Lee said in an unperturbed tone, as if they were discussing the weather, “Don’t question the authority of Eru Lee, especially when she’s clearly right.”

 

“I… Do not remember that rule,” Haru said slowly.

 

Lee then sighed, opening up the book, and revealing whited out paragraphs and handwritten rules in Lee’s own writing, at the end of a page she jotted down another rule quickly even while she spoke it out loud, “Rule number seventy-five, needlessly undermining the prowess, accomplishments, and feelings of others, even if they are Dead Last, does not make one look good by comparison. In fact, it just makes one look very whiney, sad, and will drive off any potential friends leading to the sad panda syndrome.”

 

She then closed it with finality, offering it back to Hatake who only glared at its cover as if by looking alone he could light it on fire, “I don’t want it.”

 

“Someday, Kakashi,” Lee said with all the serene air of wisdom of a monk even as she stuffed the book back into her vest, “You will appreciate my proverbs and advice. I guess I’ll just have to keep holding onto this in the meantime.”

 

By the look on Kakashi’s face that day would be a long time coming, but by the look on Lee’s face, she hardly minded the wait. Haru couldn’t say he knew Kakashi, but unfortunately, he did know Lee and because of that in this particular battle he was going to put his money down on her.

 

With that, Lee stood, and offered Haru and Kushina a small polite bow, “And with that, it seems that it’s time for me to terrify my rogue clone into line and make sure it isn’t hopelessly traumatizing the children.”

 

And then, grabbing onto Kakashi, she teleported them out, likely into the unsuspecting heart of the Uchiha compound and to whatever rogue clone Lee was talking about. Sometimes, Haru didn’t even want to know.

 

“Goddammit,” Kushina said, pounding her fist on the table, purple eyes burning with determination and desire, “I have to get a copy of that rule book.”

 

* * *

 

“Greetings, Eru-sama,” Lee’s emotional support clone said again, with a calm serenity that she perhaps did not deserve in her situation, especially given that they were both seated cross-legged at a child’s tea table, “I see you’ve brought Kakashi-kun along as well. You know, I do not believe he appreciates it.”

 

In the room flooded with Uchiha children, once again, Kakashi had gone off to sulk in a corner where he was eyed curiously by the horde of dark-eyed and dark-haired children who were too young to go to the academy. Quite a few were around his age, one even went so far as to poke at him, grinning with determination and stating that he was going to become hokage someday (to which Kakashi just stared in disbelief and irritation).

 

Lee liked that one, he had guts, and Lee had high hopes for his future.

 

“Yes, well, it builds character,” Lee said, granted she could leave Kakashi by himself, he probably could handle it. If he was ready to graduate the academy and kill bandits, he was more than ready to cook himself dinner. He’d probably even prefer it for that matter, but something at Lee just itched to leave him alone like that, especially since in his own way Kakashi was so stubbornly ignorant about the world outside of his bubble.

 

“Perhaps,” Emotional Support Lee turned babysitter said, “But that’s not what brings you here today.”

 

“Right,” Lee said, and decided that it probably was about time to get down to business and leaned forward across the table, “As you know, whenever I have time and whenever I don’t, I come to remind you that no matter how happy the children seem today if they find your corpse hanging from the ceiling fan they’ll be far more traumatized and dysfunctional tomorrow.”

 

Emotional Support Lee, as always, considered this point without emotion on her own face, having heard it more than once before, “And as always, I agree with your statement, no matter how disheartening it seems… You realize though, that this will not end well.”

 

She steepled her hands together, eyes sweeping the room and taking in the face of each child, “The elders are getting impatient with my own patience, they expected me to buckle and cave by now or at the very least to have accomplished enough of a semblance of my goal as to greet merciful death.”

 

She paused, moving from the children to look directly at Lee herself, “I am not human, Lee, and if they feel it necessary they will kill me themselves in front of their children to achieve their goal.”

 

Lee felt a cold shadow fall over her, even in this bright, warm, well lit room, “The rest of the clan would never agree to that.”

 

“The elders hold much sway, and you might be surprised, when it comes to power this family is willing to commit unspeakable acts. More, is it so unspeakable, to murder something you were hoping would kill itself in front of your children, something that was never even human?”

 

Lee considered this, considered every tidbit of information she had learned either from the nidaime and shodaime, Mikoto, or else Emotional Support Lee, and said softly and with assurance, “Mikoto would never stand for it.”

 

“Mikoto is a woman, not the clan heir, and has no power here,” Emotional Support Lee said, “It doesn’t matter what Uchiha Mikoto wants.”

 

Unspoken was the thought that Mikoto, once, at the chunin exams, had made a desperate bid to become clan heir and the next head of the family, and had failed.

 

The clone then sighed, signaling the end of discussing the power that Mikoto did and did not have, “And I am tired, Eru-sama, I am so tired. I… This will end one way or another, by my hand, by theirs, by yours…”

 

“You have a suggestion?” Lee asked.

 

Her voice was hard, as Lee’s was whenever she delivered an ultimatum, and her eyes burned so brightly, “End me, not here, but let me say goodbye and say that I’m going on some mission somewhere and won’t be coming back. They’ll understand later. And then take me out of the compound and end me out of sight before the clan does it for you.”

 

And though it was dangerous, though it was entirely too dangerous and not in line with what they truly wanted or how they were designed, Lee almost wished that her clone had the capacity to want more for herself than that.

 

But she didn’t, and she never would, and the best thing Lee could do for her, for the Uchiha children, was to do what she asked.

 

As, in fact, she had done many times before.

 

An emotional support clone cannot last more than a year, not with the knowledge that their task would never truly end. The original one the Uchiha had taken had reached that limit and given Lee an ultimatum, death in front of the children or death outside, so Lee had taken her out behind the compound, slit her throat, then burned the body.

 

It had only taken a month for them to seduce the next disillusioned Emotional Support Lee to work in the compound. And the children had smiled at her return at first, thinking she’d come back, before frowning in puzzled fear and realizing that somehow their friend Emotional Support Lee had forgotten all of them completely.

 

That one, already pushed to the brink by Orochimaru, hadn’t even lasted as long as the first.

 

And yet Lee was so tired of killing herself, over and over and over again.

 

(This one though, this one was the first to suggest action on the clan’s part, suggest to say goodbye to the children, so maybe this one could be the last or if all else failed Lee herself could come and replace her without any of them the wiser and…)

 

She sighed, closed her eyes, then nodded, “Soon, not today, not tomorrow, but soon.”

 

Lee stood, nodded down towards her other, artificial, self and said, “Until then, do your best to stay alive.”

 

The clone laughed at what she interpreted as a rather morbid joke, but nodded in turn, before standing and moving back towards the kids who all flooded towards her and her bright grin while Kakashi made his grateful escape back to Lee.

 

He put his hand in hers, only wincing slightly as they teleported back to the Hatake compound, and when their feet were on solid ground again he asked quietly, “Why do we keep going there?”

 

Lee tried to think of a way to say it, something that Kakashi would understand, and finally quietly settled on, “Because sometimes, the consequences that we could have never predicted, the ones that seem out of our hands, are more important than any others.”

 

Then, motioning him inside, she said, “Come on, we should see whatever’s left in the fridge for dinner.”

 

* * *

 

He was almost surprised that Lee was waiting up for him, but then, even at the latest of hours Lee seemed more than happy to wait with a kettle of tea in the kitchen for Sakumo to walk through the front door.

 

She’d always look up at him, smile, offer him a cup and a seat and let him sigh and rest if only for a moment before asking any questions. It was something he had come to appreciate greatly over the past year, along with everything else.

 

It was getting hard to remember a time when Lee hadn’t practically lived in the Hatake compound, hadn’t been the older obnoxious sister that Kakashi couldn’t quite bring himself to understand or communicate with for all he did appreciate her, or else Sakumo’s own long lost daughter.

 

He was going to miss her, when she inevitably passed her jonin exams and became her own person once again.

 

This time she looked almost as tired as he did as he took his seat, offering him his cup with only a small nod while he sighed and looked out at the full yellow moon that watched them from the window.

 

Quietly she said, “Kakashi would have waited up but you didn’t arrive in the village until late and I figured he could just see you in the morning.”

 

He’d probably be quite put out with her about that in the morning. Although how exactly Lee did always seem to know when either Sakumo or Minato walked through the gates was something of a mystery, likely one of her strange and mysterious blood limits.

 

Still he smiled, glanced at the clock, and nodded, “Yes, it’s a bit late for him.”

 

He then looked at her more closely, at the grim look on her face, and noted, “I always hope that the weeks you spend without me are uneventful, the look on your face has me worried that something catastrophic happened.”

 

She shook her head, forced her lips to quirk upwards, “No, it’s… not really personal but not anyone else’s problem either. Just, the ripple of an action taken many years ago.”

 

He wouldn’t pretend to understand what that meant, or prod too closely, sometimes Lee would guard her secrets very close indeed. However, he did offer a small nod, to say that he understood and that also he was willing to listen.

 

After all, everything in their lives, in a way, was the result of small actions building up from years ago.

 

“How was the mission?”

 

“Long,” Sakumo said with a sigh, “Long and classified…”

 

There had been an increasing number of ANBU missions, tension was growing, was quickly reaching a tipping point that would inevitably lead them into a third war. Already Konoha’s academy was demanding faster graduations and a quicker curriculum. Had Kakashi been born only a few years earlier, there would be no talk of him graduating at five.

 

Still, at least Kakashi would be graduated, and ready to be graduated. Sakumo hoped that they could stave off war a little longer yet, perhaps to see Lee as a jonin and Kakashi as a chunin but…

 

“War is coming, I think,” he finally said to the silent Lee who had been looking at him in askance, “And it will be as long and terrible as the last was and the one before that…”

 

Lee offered him a grim smile, “I don’t remember much of the second war.”

 

“Yes, you were in the academy then,” Sakumo said nodding to himself, he was glad that Lee and her generation had dodged the bullet with that one, too many too young genin and chunin had died in Ame.

 

“Should I start coming on these missions of yours?” Lee asked, having herself only been on non-ANBU missions with him as well as the odd collection of missions she picked up from the mission’s desk whenever he was away, which was often these days.

 

He laughed and shook his head wearily, “God, no, no however gifted you are, however much I’ve prepared you for those sorts of missions, and however Danzo salivates at the idea of you in ANBU that is not something I would recommend to anyone.”

 

Whatever Lee thought about this she kept to herself, perhaps seeing the wisdom of Sakumo’s words without seeing ANBU firsthand, or perhaps mulling it over inside her own head. In these quiet hours of the late night and early morning it was hard to tell what it was that went through her head.

 

“You’ll be glad to know things here have been quiet and uneventful,” Lee finally said, pouring herself another cup of tea, “There have been the usual D-ranks, keeping an eye on Kakashi, and picking up missions here and there while I wait for Minato and Jiraiya-sensei to get back before winter hits.”

 

Sakumo laughed, “Looking forward to that, are you?”

 

The trouble was that Lee sometimes was utterly impossible to tease, she just blinked and nodded, as if there was nothing at all wrong in the world that more than anyone else she would be waiting for Namikaze Minato to return back to the village.

 

He was about to say more, perhaps give enough hints for Lee to actually realize what he was getting at and start flushing, but then he stopped. Lee’s chakra flared, one bright flare like someone had plucked a string inside of her, and her eyes went wide for a moment, the cup fell from her fingers and shattered on the floor, hot tea pooling at her feet.

 

“Lee?!” He moved forward, gripped her shoulders, pushing chakra through her to break the genjutsu or whatever it was but Lee didn’t even seem to notice.

 

“I’ll be back,” she said softly, almost as if she couldn’t quite see him even though he was right in front of her and just like that she disappeared out of his hands, leaving him clutching empty space where his apprentice had once been.

 

* * *

 

Lee pulled herself through time and space, hurling herself through a great vacuum and further than she’d ever gone before as she traced the sudden stranglehold on her chakra back to its source. She tumbled out of emptiness into a golden hall filled with great tables filled with adolescents to young adults all in dark robes and what looked like English school uniforms, each one with a not insignificant amount of chakra.

Behind her, seated at a great table in varying ridiculous robes of a rainbow of shades, were alarmed older men and women, again with chakra levels that varied from chunin to skilled jonin.  

 

The ceiling was painted with an illusion and fuinjutsu to show moving rumbling clouds, candles suspended themselves in mid air and flickered with her arrival, great banners of snakes, lions, ravens, and badgers hung from the ceiling.

 

And next to her, the source of the pull and the stranglehold, a great goblet spouting blue flames from its rim and more than a fair share of fuinjutsu and stored chakra.

 

There were gasps, whispers, murmurs in English from behind her and in front of her that was such a cacophony that above her own pounding heartbeat she could barely make out the words.

 

“ _Who is that?_ ”

 

“ _He just called out Ellie Potter, do you think that maybe it’s…_ ”

 

“ _Cor, it’s really her, but what is she dressed as…_ ”

 

“ _It can’t be Ellie Potter, she hasn’t been seen in…_ ”

 

“ _She looks almost like a ninja from muggle Japan, well, there may be ninjas in magical Japan as well but from everything I’ve read they died out with the end of the feudal age…_ ”

 

No attacks came, no chakra flared, nothing that looked like handseals or swords or any kind of weapon, instead they seemed almost in awe of her arrival if not afraid…

 

Nothing about this was familiar, nothing expected, and it was all dreadfully and eerily English where she had expected perhaps the high mountains of Kumo or else the rocky tundra of Iwa. All the same though she drew out her kunai threw them out in a circle to hover around her in all directions facing the black robed audience as well as the table behind her.

 

She faced the great cup to destroy it even as she stated towards the table behind her, the concentration of power and authority, and to be heard above the nervous mutters and fearful shouts she stated, “ _You have ten seconds to plead your case and release your hold on me, or else I destroy your oversized cup, and deliver your heads to the third shadow of fire._ ”

 

Unfortunately, the old man in the center of the table managed to explain just enough under ten seconds to stay her hand. And even when he’d first opened his mouth, speaking with gravitas and authority but without fear, Lee had the feeling that she would sincerely regret not just blowing up the oversized cup and running away while she still had the chance.


	27. Bidding Konoha Farewell

_In which Lee finds herself contractually obligated through dubious use of fuinjutsu and a giant cup to participate in a thinly disguised assassination plot, Senju Tobirama was right this whole goddamn time and makes sure that everyone and their brother knows it, and a team is sent out to England_

 

* * *

 

“So, let me get this straight,” Lee, speaking in English inside a room behind what the old man, the wizard Dumbledore Albus, had called the Great Hall, said as she gave a rather chilling look to these poor unfortunate civilians circled around her, “As my name has been put, by an unknown party, into this magical cup of yours, I am contractually obligated to participate in your glorified version of the _chunin_ exams or else have my _chakra_ sealed off.”

 

The group surrounding her, in this dimly lit room filled with shining silver trophies and metals, strange civilian knickknacks and awards for valor outside of war, stared at her with entirely too wide of eyes. Among them, the older as well as the young champions who desperately were trying to appear anything but young (which Lee found rather funny as they all looked a good three years older than her), you could almost hear the sound of a pin dropping.

 

All this taking place, of course, in the bizarre backdrop of the English hidden village that Lee had sworn could not exist and their seven-year academy called Hogwarts. Lee felt the need to repeat that inside her mind once again, their academy, in Scotland, that they had decided to name Hogwarts.

 

A middle aged, sweating, rather nervous looking man who practically screamed civilian wiped at his brow, his dark eyes shining in the half-light of the fire as he nervously tried to make eye-contact with her, “I am afraid the rules are absolute, Miss Potter, the Goblet of Fire constitutes a binding magical contract…”

 

Lee loved how, in this rambling, he basically repeated what she’d just said. He seemed as if he could hardly believe she was even here in this room, let alone in these circumstances, but he was hardly alone in that. The Great Hall had been filled with mutterings, stares, a dull roar of whispers and rumors and even this room all eyes wandered towards her with about as much subtlety as Uzumaki Kushina.

 

Even now, there was something far more important about Eleanor Lily Potter than the fact that she had appeared out of thin air, tearing through copious wards of fuinjutsu, dressed as a shinobi with shining kunai in hand.

 

“That you are uninclined to break by merely destroying your oversized cup,” Lee finished for him with a rather contemptuous look, her suspicions more confirmed by the look of horror on all the faces at the mere idea of wasting this overpowered relic, “You know, such actions are not looked kindly upon by the Village Hidden in the Leaves.”

 

By which Lee didn’t mean it would necessarily constitute war, not for a single shinobi, but for someone with Lee’s blood limits… Well, it was a flashier tactic than any other hidden village had dared to try no matter how much they did or didn’t salivate for Lee’s blood limits. Even Kumo wouldn’t have had nearly this much gall.

 

“The Village Hidden in the…” the old man, Dumbledore, who oddly or not seemed to hold both the most power and authority here. Perhaps an unofficial kage of sorts along with being the headmaster of the academy, the title he’d claimed as he’d anxiously shepherded Lee to this room, no matter the deference he seemed to pay the sweating civilian.

 

“ _Konohagakure_ ,” Lee stiffly corrected with a sigh, tapping her metal headband and the symbol of the leaf etched there, “My home.”

 

Although by the more or less blank looks on their faces none of them had any idea what that headband truly meant.

 

One of the young men, this one wearing Hogwarts’ school uniform, stepped forward his face pale and eyes shining in both confusion and excitement as if he was meeting Jesus in the flesh, “But, you’re Ellie Potter, you’re…”

 

“Then my home for the past ten years,” Lee corrected, looking him straight in the eye and watching with raised eyebrows as he took a step back, almost in spite of himself, “Believe me, I am a happy expatriate and this whole debacle is doing nothing to change that opinion.”

 

And that, clearly, was an awkward and unexpected statement. In fact, none of them seemed to know what to do with her since she’d arrived. They were torn between gushing about something, something having to do with Eleanor Lily Potter, and then explaining this whole mess.

 

(That half of it was lining up with what the English nin had been spouting for years also was doing nothing to improve Lee’s overall mood.)

 

“I am afraid you have no choice,” the civilian voice of authority said, wincing as he looked at her, “As of tonight, you are a Triwizard Champion.”

 

“Right, your glorified _chunin_ exams,” Lee said with a grimace, because of course Lee didn’t get to take her chunin exams just the first time, she had to take it multiple times and once in England.

 

England that wasn’t even supposed to have shinobi but apparently did but were so incompetent as to leave Lee with the goddamn Dursleys where she could so easily immigrate to Konoha. As if she would have contented herself to sit still until eleven and they came to collect her.

 

Worse, she thought to herself, none of these people seemed to realize the danger they were in. Oh, sure, they felt the killing intent, but they didn’t realize that Lee had meant every word she’d said in the Great Hall. That Dumbledore Albus really had had only ten seconds to stay her hand before the jutsus and kunai started flying.

 

In Konoha, that kind of naiveite wasn’t even seen in genin. Eru Lee arrives out of nowhere into their academy cafeteria, killing intent through the roof, you do not start whispering in awe.

 

She spared these people each a dull look, unimpressed by each in their own different way, from the champions to their keepers. All had chakra, most were chunin if you judged by chakra alone, with a few smatterings of jonin in the fold, but each so… Civilian and ridiculous looking. Honestly, they were wearing multicolored bathrobes and although looked a tad nervous around Lee there wasn’t that hardened determination that would come with a foreign shinobi invading your village academy.

 

If Lee needed a sign that reality was crumbling, other than having found herself summoned for this in the middle of the night, then it was staring her in the goddamn face.

 

“And I’m supposed to ignore that this is clearly a blatant attempt at assassination or else kidnapping?” Lee asked with a sigh, and they genuinely looked shocked and appalled at that, or at least her fellow champions did, the others looked as if she had just casually spoken their worst fears allowed.

 

One of the older ones, a peg legged man with a false eye that practically burned with chakra, spat out, “The girl has a point, the Goblet of Fire is not easily confounded, not by any mere student, no this is the work of dark wizards and…”

 

“Given this a lot of thought, have you?” A bearded taller man, who had been lingering towards the shaved headed boy with a slavic hint to his features, hissed out.

 

“You forget, Kakoroff, that it was once my job to think as dark wizards do.”

 

“And none of you have answered my question,” Lee said shortly, words cutting through the bickering and demanding the attention of all around her, “I, clearly, am ridiculously important to you people for whatever reason.”

 

Judging by their expressions this was the understatement of a century.

 

 “Now, why you saw fit to leave a resource like that in muggle suburbia I’ll likely never know. That said, this is an insultingly obvious trap for me and my people and I want to know why I shouldn’t just blow up your whole goddamn school, along with your precious cup, and be on my merry way?”

 

Well, for one thing, the hokage would have her head, but they didn’t need to know that part. Even he’d be understanding when the trap was this goddamn obvious, he’d just pile on so much paperwork to Lee that she’d regret being born.

 

“You’re… You’re not serious, are you?” the boy, the one wearing the dark cloak and the yellow and black tie, said.

 

“You have my attention, gentlemen,” Lee said, as if that was answer enough, that Eru Lee’s attention was not something to be envied.

 

“The goblet can’t so easily be destroyed,” peg leg the one-eyed shinobi sneered down at her, seeming to have issues seeing her as she was rather than the fourteen-year-old English academy student he seemed to be used to, “And even if it could, you’d probably still be bound to fulfil the terms, the damage is done.”

 

“Well, isn’t that convenient?” Lee asked, giving the man a rather pointed look, one he managed to return without flinching.

 

“There is…” the middle aged, gray-haired, wizard coughed into his sleeve, clearing his throat, “There is also the honor and glory that comes with participating, many younger students have tried and failed to put their names into the goblet for this reason, not to mention the money.”

 

And Lee, almost against her will, felt her attention and interest finally snag. She held up a hand to stop him, eyes wide, and said, “Hold up, what money?”

 

“Well, the reward for winning the tournament is a, well, quite a hefty sum of gold,” and he said this so casually, the word gold, as if gold pieces grew on trees.

 

Lee, at once, remembered that she was very poor. Lee was an orphan without a penny to her name, as Minato was an orphan without a penny to his name, and everything they owned or had had been earned through the blood, sweat, and tears of shinobi mission pay or else stipends from the state for when they had been in the academy. As content as she was Lee was hopelessly aware that there wasn’t extra cash lying around, that she’d be likely living in an apartment for the rest of her life unless she inconceivably married into some clan or another, and that almost every other meal she’d ever had be ramen if she wanted to afford top of the line weapons.

 

And the word gold, so casually thrown around like that, well, Lee wouldn’t deny that it had a very nice ring to it.

 

So, trying to remind herself that this was a terrible idea, she found herself asking, “How much gold?”

 

A figure was thrown out, an obscene amount of galleons, large gold coins used as currency among English shinobi, and Lee felt part of her iron resolve crumble. Oh, lord, that was so much money, and she wanted it, she wanted it so very badly.

 

With that kind of money she could buy a clan compound, she could buy a film industry and start converting her beloved films into shinobi versions, there could be a shinobi version of ‘The Terminator’…

 

She gave out a long, terrible, sigh and said, “I will have to talk this over with my superiors. You’ll have your answer in a few days.”

 

“Superiors, answers, a few days?!”

 

But Lee was already gone, arrived back in Sakumo-shishou’s kitchen with his arms flinging around her and squeezing as he cried out, “Lee!”

 

Lee pulled out of the hug after only a moment, looked at him with a smile that then faded into a grimace and a rather worn sigh, “Well, shishou, it appears I have good news and bad news.”

 

* * *

 

“You do realize they’re going to try and kill you or kidnap you?” Tobirama pointed out when Lee, well into the night, finally finished her rather extensive tale about how she was wrong, and she was sorry, and England did have a hidden village after all, and she’d somehow been bound by her very chakra to participate in their chunin exams.

 

As usual it was him, Hiruzen, and Hashirama all sitting in the hokage’s office at god even knew what hour. There should be a limit to how much he could see of Lee in a day, let alone a week…

 

Lee sighed, rubbing at her eyes and looking about as tired as Tobirama felt, and drily noted, “I pointed that out to them and they were shocked and appalled.”

 

Still, that was an assassination attempt, or a kidnapping, if he’d ever heard of one. Guarantee that a shinobi has to be in a certain place and time or else seal off their chakra… It was unfortunate for them, perhaps, that Lee appeared to be far more powerful than they had expected. A jonin in all but technicality.

 

Of course, one could never know, perhaps they were expecting that as well as her blood limits. Only Ren’s own constant bafflement and irritation over Lee’s extensive capabilities gave Tobirama the hint that England would be just as at a loss with her as Konoha was.

 

Still, she wasn’t lying, or else England wasn’t bluffing, even now a thread seemed to connect her chakra from here to… Well, Tobirama didn’t know, only that it was somewhere much further than his sensing range. Perhaps it could be broken, perhaps with Lee it could be broken, but Tobirama didn’t like the idea of touching something like that. And neither, apparently, did Eru Lee.

 

“However, if I win this ridiculous thing of theirs, I do get an absurd amount of money, even with S-rank fees to the village paid,” Lee said with a shrug, looking far more tempted by that idea than she had any right to. Though Tobirama supposed if one was going to find an upside to this situation, to this mess, then that was a good one.

 

Hiruzen seemed more or less in agreement as he sighed at the idea and asked, “And if you don’t win?”

 

“Honor and glory,” Lee said dully, to which she meant they would not be seeing a single cent, however by the look on her face for pride alone Lee wasn’t going to lose to her English counterparts.

 

However, Tobirama wasn’t going to get into that now, instead, giving Lee a rather pointed look, he couldn’t help but ask, “That said, Lee, do you have something specific to say to me?”

 

She stared at the floor, glared at it really, and for a moment said nothing. Then, after a second’s pause, she looked up and said, “You were right, I was wrong, there are…Well, I’m not going to call them shinobi because they’re really not, but there are wizards in England, and they are stupid jackasses who wear bathrobes and carry around wooden sticks to channel their chakra.”

 

“I just wanted to hear you say it,” Tobirama said with a pleased grin, an expression he rarely indulged in and yet just couldn’t help at the moment, even if her description left quite a lot to ask for.

 

Lee’s eyes flashed even as she grimaced, “Although I do reiterate that shinobi is a very strong word.”

 

“I’m sorry, did they not just bind you with advanced fuinjutsu over thousands of miles to get you to participate in a tournament?” Tobirama asked, earning a grimace from Hashirama as he asked, “Tobi, don’t you think you’re pushing a little too…”

 

“Fuinjutsu does not a shinobi make,” Lee countered, “And you didn’t see them! I show up out of nowhere, kunai blazing, and they looked like they were about to cheer! These people have no idea what a shinobi is!”

 

“Fuinjutsu, makes even a wizard close enough,” Tobirama countered, daring Lee to correct him, she didn’t, merely stewed in silence.

 

“Regardless, clearly, competition or not, it’s time we did something about _England_ ,” Hiruzen interjected into the rather stony silence, then looking at Lee, he asked, “Exactly what did you tell them.”

 

“That I would come back a few days later with word from my superiors,” Lee said, “I won’t say I got much information, as you can imagine I was a bit… antsy, but the other foreign wizard schools there that they invited sent a fair number of what they called upper level academy students, so all over the age of seventeen, as well as a few professors. They wouldn’t bat an eye at us sending a standard four-person team or even two or three of them.”

 

That was a nice thought, but it wasn’t exactly as if there were eight or twelve in Konoha who even spoke any amount of English. Certainly, they couldn’t take the English shinobi, not without seeing it for themselves, which left himself, Lee, Namikaze Minato, Uzumaki Kushina, Hatake Kakashi from whatever he’d picked up from tagging along with Lee and her practically living in his house, Haru if you truly stretched the definition of passable English, Hashirama…

 

And judging by the look of delight and excitement on his older brother’s face, Hashirama was already packed and ready to go. Not that Tobirama himself wasn’t, if he thought about it. Even now there was some distant thrill inside him at the idea of seeing entirely new worlds, this strange vast world that Lee and Ren had painted a picture of that was at once so familiar and so very different.

 

Yes, he thought as his own smile grew on his face (and a rather sour expression appeared on Lee’s), in a few days he would be more than ready to help lead a team, likely anyone and everyone remotely suitable (himself, Hashirama, Lee, Minato, Haru, and likely Kushina) and dump the whining English shinobi on someone else in the meantime.

 

Assassination and kidnapping plots aside, Tobirama thought this could be a lot of fun, and besides, that sort of thing built character for someone like Eru Lee.

 

* * *

 

“Oh, _England_ , country after my own heart,” Lee moaned in despair, laying on the grass and watching as one of the last good days of Fall rolled by, “I am going to loathe you so much.”

 

Kakashi, lying next to her, dragged along to accompany Lee after the academy had ended for the day, predictably said nothing at all. Just as he’d said more or less nothing at the announcement in the morning that Lee was going to be out of town for a while, possibly nine months year with only a few pitstops back to Konoha at a time. Of course, he had been distracted by his father’s anticlimactic return, so there was that. Still, something in Lee did hurt at Kakashi’s lack of interest.

 

It was true that their relationship was a strange one, mostly an unwilling one on Kakashi’s end, but she’d known him for about a year now and he still pretended that he could only barely tolerate the sight of her. Like it was a relief that she would be out of his house for almost a year and then perhaps out of his life whenever she became a jonin.

 

A jonin… She hoped she could take however many days off from this stupid English exam for the jonin exams. The only benefit was that Minato was going to be there as well, was even now rushing back post haste from whatever backwater civilian country he was in this time with Jiraiya, and so if her exams were delayed his were as well. Not to mention it had been a long time since any incarnation of team seven had gone on a mission together even with Kushina as a plus one.

 

Lee could appreciate that, perhaps even look forward to it, even if it was going to be in England.

 

Still, her eyes drifted back to the always stoic, always so serious, Hatake Kakashi who was even now staring up at the clouds with the kind of somber contemplation suited to middle aged men.

 

“You know, Kashi, you could at least pretend to care,” Lee said as she smiled down at him, noting the way he didn’t even twitch or look towards her, “After all, you might just miss me when I’m gone.”

 

He just gave her this silent disbelieving look, as if to say he found that very idea inconceivable.

 

“It’s true, you miss all sorts of things when they’re suddenly not in your life anymore,” Lee said with an air of earned wisdom. Minato she had missed instantly, obviously, but it was more than that. She’d learned to miss small signs of his presence in the apartment, in the village, things she hadn’t even realized she’d noticed like the way he folded his laundry or the piles of books he left open on the table when he was distracted.

 

She missed team seven in its entirety, not just Minato, but her, Dead Last, and even their horrible plant zombie infested missions.

 

It was all the little things you barely even thought about that you missed more than anything in the world.

 

Kakashi, predictably, rolled his eyes towards the heavens as if to ask for guidance from above but didn’t say a single word. It struck her at once that he’d probably be taller, whenever she came back.

 

“I’ll miss you,” Lee said, turning her attention back towards the sky and the rolling clouds, “You and Sakumo-shishou and Konoha… It’s going to be a while.”

 

But for today, at least, Hatake Kakashi was hardly going to admit to missing her. That was fine, Lee thought, perhaps not ideal but it was what it was. One of these days, Kakashi would learn the real meaning of life or something close to it, but today just wasn’t going to be that day.

 

She gave him one last smile, sat up, and ruffled his silver hair with a pale hand, ignoring his look of extreme annoyance.

 

“Well, I’ll be seeing you and shishou tonight and probably until Minato and Jiraiya-sensei make it back to the village,” Lee said as she stood, “But in the meantime enjoy your freedom.”

 

“Freedom?” Kakashi balked, a surprised and delighted spark appearing in his eyes, “You mean you aren’t going to drag me across the village today?”

 

“Nope,” Lee said shortly as she brushed the grass off her clothing, “I have some unpleasant last-minute errands that you do not want to be a part of. Consider yourself a free…”

 

She couldn’t even finish her sentence, he had already sprinted away from her, leaping into the air with joy. Except staring flatly at his retreating back Lee knew the only thing he was going to do was more extracurricular training like the giant nerd that he was so he didn’t need to act that excited.

 

Lee sighed, shoving her hands into her pockets, “Honestly, that brat.”

 

How that kid was Sakumo-shishou’s son, well aside from the fact that they looked almost identical, was entirely beyond her. Even shishou, she thought, really had no idea what to make of his adorably precocious, if slightly pretentious and annoying, son.

 

“Oh well,” Lee said as she started to make her slow, meandering, way through the village, “It’s probably for the best.”

 

For today, at least, because if Kakashi wasn’t going to ask questions about what last minute business Lee had other than paying months rent in advance, picking up supplies, cleaning the apartment and emptying the fridge, then all the better. Because some of her last tasks were not nearly so tedious or pleasant and probably hadn’t even crossed Kakashi’s mind.

 

The walk seemed longer than usual, or perhaps it was Lee that was unconsciously slowing down, taking in one of these last few pleasant days in Fall where the air was clear and brisk, the leaves a heady red and orange, and the sun shining through the blue sky.

 

Soon she’d be at the gates of Konoha, teleporting team seven and company back to England to the amazement of their English peers, finding out whatever awaited them there and what exactly they would be doing in this competition thing.

 

And Lee guessed that she’d just have to suck it up and deal and take it as it came, hoping against hope that the nidaime wouldn’t demand to see her relatives or Surrey or anything else. Or that Hogwarts wouldn’t get too weird, although it was already guaranteed to get entirely too weird with her introduction and the fact that it was named Hogwarts.

 

At least Minato would be there to experience the weird for himself first hand though.

 

With that thought Lee found herself at the gates to the Uchiha compound, sighing as she stood in front of the entrance. Then, lacing herself in the usual Uchiha avoidance genjutsu she vaulted over the walls and wandered her way towards their clan day care where she would undoubtedly find Emotional Support Lee.

 

And there she was, right inside like always, smiling a smile that reached her eyes and didn’t all at once. A strange, alien, almost human expression for Eru Lee’s face. The clone looked up, smiling at first, and then frowning as Lee approached.

 

“Nee-san, it’s your clone again,” one of the children, tugging on Emotional Support Lee’s hair, noted as he pointed to Lee with a chubby finger.

 

“Actually, Lee is the original,” Emotional Support Lee reminded the little boy, “I’m the one who’s the clone.”

 

The boy seemed confused, and a bit upset at that, but didn’t get a chance to say as much as Emotional Support Lee turned her attention to Lee, “I take it you have news.”  


Lee for a moment said nothing, just observed the little boy, the one who always shouted about being hokage if Lee was remembering right, as well as the clone. Finally, Lee said, “I’ve thought about what you’ve said, and I wanted to let you know that I’m taking something of a long-term mission.”

 

And her clone, Lee saw, knew immediately what that meant where the little Uchiha didn’t. The clone said nothing for a moment, a quiet, “Ah” of realization.

Then, she smiled down at the boy, pulling his fingers away from her red hair, “Obito, I’m afraid that I have to go away on a mission for a while, perhaps a very long one.”

 

Some of the other children looked over as the boy, Obito, cried out, “But you can’t go!”

 

“That’s what ninjas do, Obito, they leave on missions sometimes,” Emotional Support Lee said with a soft smile, the kind Lee would have sworn could never fit on her own face as she stood, until she was the same height as Lee herself, “And someday you’ll leave on missions too, that’s just how life is in Konoha.”

 

Obito didn’t seem to like that but he nodded easily enough, and allowed them to be swarmed by the other Uchiha children old enough to understand what was happening, all saying their heartfelt goodbyes to Lee’s emotionally supportive clone, only ever glancing at the strange Eru Lee herself.  

 

And it was… strange, Lee thought, how much of a connection these kids seemed to have with her, some part of her, when Lee barely knew them at all. They waited until it was after dark, until after the last child was picked up, none of the adults so much as glancing at Lee herself.

 

Then, when the room was empty, Emotional Support Lee slipped her arm casually through Lee’s, let her walk her outside of the building and then outside of the compound. The moon was large and bright, “You should check in on them, afterwards.”

 

Lee spared Emotional Support Lee a glance, but the clone only stared up at the moon, “It will be hard for them, when they realize I’m not coming back.”

 

The clone then spared her a rather intense, penetrating, look, “That none of us will be.”

 

Lee stopped in her tracks, looked at her other self, wondering if it had been written on her face. That this was to be the end of Emotional Support Lees, that Lee for better or worse had to cut ties here and leave the Uchiha children, Orochimaru, to fend for themselves if only to stave off whatever might happen in her absence.

 

And it felt… Not cathartic, not quite, but something heavier and lighter than that, an admission of failure and of letting go. Of consequences unseen, still sending ripples out on the surface of their world.

 

“I’m sorry,” was all Lee could think to say as they finally made it to an empty training ground.

 

“You tried,” her clone told her with that same smile she had given the children, not that you didn’t fail, not that you succeeded, but that you tried.

 

Still, even now Lee felt like she was caught in this endless cycle of her own creation. Of creating clones first for an Orochimaru who even now slipped steadily downward, those being sold off to the Uchiha, and then trying and failing to protect the next generation of Uchiha from her death and the sharingan.

 

Even with this, Lee didn’t feel as if she was cutting all conceivable threads, like she was somehow even now still in her own trap without realizing it. And yet… And yet she couldn’t think of anything else to possibly be done. She would kill this clone, and then find Orochimaru’s lab and kill her successor, and then it would be the end of the line, just like that…

 

Like it was that easy to create and destroy life.

 

“Yes,” Lee whispered, even as she drove a kunai through the heart of her mirror image, watching her face pale, blood spurt from her lips and chest, and her eyes glaze as she crumpled into her living, original, counterpart, “I did try.”

 

* * *

 

Only three days later, team seven minus Jiraiya-sensei but plus Uzumaki Kushina, the nidaime, and the shodaime, ventured forth into that bright unknown land of England.


	28. Lee's Brave New World

_In which our shinobi protagonists arrive in Scotland and experience quite a bit of culture shock, meet and greet a few English counterparts who prove themselves more bizarre than the English shinobi, and Lee hates everyone already._

 

* * *

Unfortunately, they appeared to arrive in the middle of breakfast.

 

Lee felt this was unfortunate because, like her untimely arrival in the middle of dinner on the night of fuinjutsu goblet doom, it meant that the great hall was filled with children of all shapes and sizes all chowing down on your typical English breakfast. Well, typical enough, if some of the breakfast items were mysteriously moving or else staring back with blinking eyes at the children then Lee wasn’t going to question that too closely.

 

Mostly though, it meant everyone and their brother was there to turn their heads towards Team Konohagakure with gaping mouths filled with food, some even going so far to choke as they took in the sight of them, and the intense awed English whispering to commence once again.

 

“I hate these people already,” Lee couldn’t help but mutter, but unfortunately her companions were a bit too distracted to pay Lee much mind. Strike that, they were looking a bit too ill to pay it much mind.

 

It turned out that teleporting between England and Konoha was not a walk in the park, and, as Minato had often attested, being pulled along for the ride as the teleportee was much more nauseating than being the teleporter. As a result, everyone but Lee was a pretty interesting shade of green right about now, from Dead Last all the way to the nidaime, as they each desperately tried not to hurl in front of their captive audience.

 

And, glancing at Dead Last, he looked worryingly close to hurling on some poor awed shmuck’s breakfast.

 

“Oh, god,” Uzumaki said as she straightened upwards through sheer force of will, staring blearily out at the hall with dazed lavender eyes, “I was not prepared for that. Is this what dying feels like? Because I’m not a fan, believe it.”

 

Lee wasn’t exactly sure, as always, why Lee was supposed to believe Uzumaki Kushina didn’t like feeling nauseous as hell. Sometimes she wondered if Uzumaki didn’t just tack on “believe it” to every other sentence for completeness sake, that, or like the term “inconceivable” it didn’t mean what she thought it meant.

 

Rather than comment on that Lee chose to look over the hall once again. And yes, it looked just as civilian and bizarre in the daylight. The giant cup of doom was missing, relocated somewhere in the depths of the castle amongst several other mystical items (and or imprisoned people) that appeared to be all but gushing chakra. In fact, now that Lee thought about it, this entire building was gushing chakra in a way that buildings just… didn’t. Even sealed buildings like the hokage tower or the walls of the Senju compound, lathered in complicated fuinjutsu, didn’t have the same over the top feeling that this place did. For good reason too, this place wasn’t a fortress, it was a bloody beacon to any enemy ninja even as far away as France. It was like every conceivable inch had been crammed with chakra, not just fuinjutsu either (though there was plenty of that), but ambient chakra hanging about in the stones. It was almost enough chakra, she thought with no small amount of alarm, to practically provide the building a goddamn soul.

 

Lee chose not to think about that but instead let her eyes drift towards the ceiling and the decorations that had remained in place. There were still the overly large banners featuring everyone’s favorite mascots of giant snake, giant lion, giant raven, and of course a giant badger. Because someone’s favorite animal was a badger and the snake and lion fans couldn’t bring themselves to say, “Sorry, but badgers are lame, have a tiger or a dragon instead”.

 

The students were all in their black robes again, each sporting a striped color tie that matched the colors of their banners, and all in all looking somewhat like Catholic school children but with the addition of wooden jutsu sticks and the open black robes.

 

Somehow, much more ridiculous looking by far, was the long table behind Lee featuring the adult academy instructors, who were a whole rainbow of colors and questionable fashion statements.

 

In other words, even days later and now in daylight, it was still hard to believe that this place was really, well, a place. No matter what that smarmy bastard the English ninja insisted.

 

The English academy students, almost all at least five or six years older than your usual Konoha academy student, were now whisper-shouting to each other excitedly while Lee’s recovering teammates were beginning to recover and gawk instead (Minato and the nidaime both similarly captivated by the ostentatious fuinjutsu on the ceiling that had been set there to display an illusion of the early morning sky).

 

“ _It’s Ellie Potter!_ ” a lanky ginger sporting a red and gold tie whispered entirely too loudly to his rather mousey and pudgy looking companion, “ _Cor, Neville, look, she came back! Blimey, they just apparated into Hogwarts again, didn’t they? Bloody hell, I think she’s looking right at me…_ ”

 

Cue bushy haired girl sighing and correcting her overeager ginger friend with a look of exasperation that seemed a bit too dramatic to be truly sincere (Lee had the sudden feeling that little school girl greatly enjoyed correcting little school boys), “ _Ron, they didn’t apparate into Hogwarts, no one can do that…_ ”

 

“ _I don’t know, Mione, kind of looks like they did._ ”

 

“ _And I’m saying it only looks like they did. Think, Ron, ‘Hogwarts a History’ is very clear about…_ ”

 

At a different table Lily caught the eye of a blonde boy, whose hair was almost silver, eyeing her up and down as if she was some priceless opportunity he had been presented and was as of this moment planning on how best to make her acquaintance.

 

Yes, Lee really did already hate all these people.

 

It was just too bad that no one with her, Minato, Uzumaki, Dead Last, and even their superior officers in the form of the nidaime and the shodaime, seemed to feel the same way. Look at them, Lee thought bitterly, and you’d think it was Christmas.

 

(Which was really saying something as Christmas wasn’t even Christmas in Konoha. It was still a new and shiny thing that Lee was trying to get the people of Konoha to embrace full heartedly. The trouble was that shinobi didn’t really do public holidays, much less ones that had nothing to do with commemorating the founding of the village or the end of some war or another.)

 

Look at Minato’s eyes, she thought to herself, the daylight and hovering candles were caught inside them like stars. The grin on his face, that familiar excited and wonderous smile at something new and surprising and so filled with opportunity, simply couldn’t be contained.

 

It almost matched the grin he’d had when he and Jiraiya had arrived back in Konoha the night before, greeting her at the gate like always, seeming to somehow be a head taller, a little bit tanner from the summer months out in the field, and a little bit closer to becoming the man he’d be someday than when she’d last seen him.

 

And even now, standing in this stupid hall, she wished there had been more time in Konoha. Not just to catch up with Minato, but to train with Sakumo-shishou, or really be anywhere but in this place that had seemed bound and determined to ignore her for at least eleven years if the English shinobi was to be believed.

 

“ _Ah, Miss Potter,_ _I see you have arrived, true to your word,_ ” Lee turned and there, stepping towards them from the long table, was the headmaster, who by Konoha standards would have been on his death bed decades ago. He was smiling rather cheerfully at her, wearing the face of the kindly grandfather she’d never had, as if he wasn’t alarmed at all that she had just teleported into the heart of his academy once again with five more in tow.

 

Then again, Lee thought, these people seemed to be remarkably naïve about the threat Lee posed. So, perhaps the thought of Lee slaughtering all their children simply hadn’t occurred to any of them.

 

“ _Albus,_ _don’t just accept her at her word. She just apparated in through Hogwarts’ wards like they were paper, that’s not the feat of any ordinary fourteen-year-old witch, not without dark magic. Constant vigilance!_ ” the grizzled Englishman with the epileptic eye and wooden leg hissed out, giving Dumbledore a rather pointed look which the man waved off with a fond and indulgent smile.

 

Still, blinking, Lee thought she’d have to amend her statement. Apparently, one wizard had thought about the true lethal threat Lee and company posed, he was just summarily ignored. No, not just ignored, but written off the way you’d write off the opinions of the senile. Only, he was the senile old man who’d finally gone a bit too far and said something far too insulting to be tolerated. In the background Lee could hear insulted gasps and questions of who this Madeye Moody even thought he was.

 

“ _Paranoia can only get one so far, Alistair,_ ” Dubmledore chided, much to the discomfort of those sitting at the staff table “ _More, I believe that perhaps apparating into Hogwarts is proof enough that this is Eleanor Potter._ ”

 

“ _Yes, right,_ ” Lee said, stepping forward and leaning against the long wooden staff table with a sigh as she decided that it was now or never and that it was best to interrupt whatever the hell this even was before it got going, “ _As you can see I checked with my superiors, and after some debate, we’ve decided to take you up on this Triwizard Tournament thing you have going on. And you know, to bring along our own… academy students and professors._ ”

 

Far be it for Lee to correct any assumptions they made regarding the massively overqualified academy students Minato, Lee, Uzumaki, and even Dead Last as well as their even more overqualified academy chunin senseis of the previous hokages.

 

Although, she thought with a growing sense of bafflement, these people seemed… Well, aside from Lee and odd cryptic comments about how of course she could manage to get through their fuinjutsu guarding against teleportation, they seemed to have no idea just what they were dealing with. It was like there wasn’t a single sensor in the whole damn place. Normally two kages, Lee, and a jinchuuriki all walk into a bar and it’s not the setup to a joke, it’s the end of the goddamn world.

 

Uzumaki was practically under village arrest along with the hokages because of that fact. Any of them showing their face near some other village, at this point, might just be the thing needed to start up the third shinobi war that Sakumo-shishou swore up and down was coming. Only the fact that England was so very foreign and that Konoha was desperate for English speaking shinobi had gotten them here.

 

Here though, other than whispering about Lee (which Lee would admit she was damn impressive and would fully own up to that), they didn’t seem… nearly alarmed enough. Not nearly as alarmed as Lee herself would have been in their shoes.

 

Lee’s rather casual and reluctant introduction earned her an impressive glare from Senju Tobirama as well as a whack against the back of her head as he himself stepped forward, and with far more authority and gravitas said in entirely too perfect English, “ _What Lee Eru,_ ” he paused, looked down at her, and corrected himself, “ _What Eleanor Potter, I believe means to say, is that we agree to your terms and conditions for your competition and would be delighted to represent_ Konohagakure _in the Triwizard Tournament._ ”

 

Dumbledore just nodded to himself, weaving his hands together, “ _Yes, I see, although that hardly makes it a Triwizard Tournament anymore, does it? Not with four schools…_ ”

 

A woman, sitting on his right, put her head into her hand and despaired in a Scottish brogue, “ _Albus, honestly._ ”

Dumbledore however, only smiled and stood, his eyes almost twinkling with that grandfatherly shine as he looked over at the six of them, “ _I suppose we’d best discuss details in my office._ ”

 

He then started humming out a melody that, well, didn’t seem like much of a melody at all. Rather some sort of mad tune you’d expect from someone truly senile. Then again, Lee supposed as they followed him out while ignoring the excited chattering of the students, Lee supposed as the most powerful in the room as all shinobi he deserved to be the most eccentric because of it.

 

Still, Lee couldn’t help the foreboding feeling as they climbed their way through the castle (where even the staircases insisted on moving around like drunk toddlers) that like everything else here this man was that much worse if only because he was from a nonsensical place like England.

 

* * *

 

Minato, though he had rarely admitted as much to Lee, had often daydreamed of what her world, her England, looked like. At first there were so many details, handed out in faltering conversation as Lee had learned his own native tongue, and then they became fewer and further in between and Minato’s imagination ran rampant.

 

He imagined the streets paved in asphalt, the glass windows in every building and some buildings standing taller than any tower, so tall that one had to ride up in a steel box to reach the top of them. He imagined the cinemas, the thousands upon thousands of films and television shows to accompany the thousands upon thousands of books.

 

Then, when the English ninja had appeared, his curiosity had only deepened with the witches and the wizards, the great mystery surrounding Lee’s family and her country, as well as the question of how old her country truly was. If it was possible that it was four times as old as any of the elemental nations could remember.

 

He learned early though that these weren’t things Lee wanted to hear. She’d taken bits and pieces of her culture, but the rest had been abandoned without a glance backward. Minato supposed he should be grateful for that, that there had never even been lingering doubt that Lee might return to her home country, but it had been so certain that the idea had never even occurred to him. He’d just held his tongue and learned to ask questions sparingly if at all.

 

However, none of his idle daydreams had prepared him for this.

 

Everything hummed with fuinjutsu, and he meant everything. Every block of stone in the wall, the paintings, the sticks of wood in every wizard’s hand, even the books all had some small fraction of chakra vibrating within them, trapped by seals. The castle seemed almost alive because of it, furniture moving here and there, summoned by chakra and strange jutsus directed through the wood of the sticks, the wands according to the English shinobi in Konoha, and miracles of ninjutsu were performed as if they were nothing at all.

 

Stranger than that though, was that Minato was beginning to see what Lee had always insisted, what Ren, the English shinobi, insisted. This castle, this fortress from ages gone by, was not a hidden village and these were not shinobi. There was a strange whimsical civilian cast to everything, a lack of anything familiar and militant, and standing here in Dumbledore Albus’ office Minato felt oddly out of place and uncomfortable as if by the fact that he was a shinobi he was more than unwelcome.

 

It’d struck him, climbing up the endless staircases that, for whatever reason, felt the need to move sporadically on their own, that the only jutsus ever developed in Konoha were for military use. It wasn’t even just that the money of research and development only went to these practical kinds of jutsus, though this was true, it was more that no one in Konoha would ever even think to spend the time or energy creating a jutsu that wasn’t for it. Here they had small, useless, civilian jutsus to clear tables and turn the pages in books.

 

Or, he thought as he stared at Dumbledore’s overcluttered desk, to make mysterious silver ticking instruments sending out small bursts of chakra at regular intervals. This, combined with the strange fire bird, the phoenix, sleeping in the corner, made for yet another room filled to the brink with chakra, enough to almost drown out Dumbledore himself.

 

Something which appeared to be getting to the nidaime as, since they’d entered this place, he’d looked more and more tense likely do the the sheer amount of chakra running loose through the place.

 

Hogwarts was a sensor’s worst nightmare, and it made you wonder how any of the witches and wizards could possibly stand it.

 

Dumbledore, sitting in a rather plush golden chair behind the desk, still sat staring with them as if everything was perfectly fine. Minato wanted to say it was an act, and he suspected part of it was, but as Lee had noted before they’d arrived he didn’t seem to quite… grasp what was going on.

 

This would not happen in Konoha, if someone teleported into an academy classroom ANBU would be swarming the place within seconds and they’d find themselves quickly in T&I. Yet, there hadn’t even been talk of arresting them or throwing them out of the castle, no attempt to confront them, just strange chattering about Lee and her return which…

 

Well, Minato hadn’t realized, hadn’t suspected, that Lee would be so expected. Granted, the English nin had always insisted Lee had been from a very wealthy and prominent clan, was the clan heir in fact and de facto clan head should she return, but this was far more than even that. This was… something more than unnerving.

 

Dumbledore, speaking in English, interrupted Minato’s thoughts, “First and foremost, I suppose it is my duty as headmaster to welcome you to Hogwarts. In the future, though you surprisingly can against all expectations, I suggest you not apparate through Hogwarts’ wards, Miss Potter.”

 

This last bit was said with a joke, but with enough seriousness to hint that it was more a demand than a gentle request. Lee said nothing, merely narrowed her eyes at the man, waiting for the other shoe to drop with impatience.

 

“Second, an introduction I believe is in order. Miss Potter and I met a few memorable days ago with the goblet of fire fiasco, to the rest of you I am Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts school of witchcraft and wizardry,” with a smile he held out his hand towards the center of their semi-circle, leaving the rest of them all sort of staring at each other. Well, the rest of them besides the shodaime, who with a beaming grin stepped forward to take Dumbledore’s hand in his own.

 

“It’s an honor to meet you, Mr. Dumbledore,” Senju Hashirama said with a truly blinding grin, “And see your school, you see, we don’t really have anything like this back at home.”

 

Minato realized with a start, then, that even if this was a whole new world for him it was something even more than that for Senju Hashirama. This was a world in which people with chakra, people who should have been shinobi were… not. Instead they were students, even into their late teens all still students in the academy.

 

There was war, certainly, if the English shinobi was to be believed but already it didn’t look the same. This, maybe, was a glimpse of the world Senju Hashirama had dreamed of all those years ago. A world in which a child with chakra didn’t have to be a shinobi.

 

“Oh, right, I’m Hashirama Senju,” the shodaime said in realization before motioning to the rest of them in order, ignoring his brother’s rather exasperated expression, “That’s my brother, Tobirama, and this is Haru Matsuda, Kushina Uzumaki, Minato Namikaze, and of course Lee Eru you’ve already met.”  


“Lee…” Dumbledore started, brow furrowed, and a spark of something anxious entering his expression.

 

“Sorry, Ellie Potter,” Hashirama corrected himself with a wince as he then explained, “Sorry, we just don’t really call her that at home.”

 

For a moment it looked as if Dumbledore was going to say something to that and Minato wondered if he would point out that home, perhaps, should be England for Eleanor Lily Potter. Or, perhaps, he’d protest to them having some other foreign name for her. Something in him seemed wary of her, of them, now in a way more open than before as if he really had been expecting Lee to come leaping back into England’s arms.

 

However, Dumbledore said nothing to that just nodded, “Pleased to meet all of you. Now, with that out of the way, there’s the small and rather boring matter of logistics.”

 

Dumbledore settled back into his sheet, he flicked his wooden stick, and Minato could feel the slightest flare of chakra and watched as he summoned a book of what looked like schedules to his desk, “Now, young Mr. Matsuda, Mr. Namikaze, Miss Uzumaki, and Miss Potter all look to be around fourteen or fifteen so I suppose that would place them in fourth year. Which two electives would each of your students like to take specifically?”

 

They blinked, blinked again, and Minato at once felt oddly young in a way that he hadn’t in a very long time. He’d almost forgotten what age he was, except when civilians reminded him of it, instead age in Konoha usually translated to rank. True, there were genin who were adults, adults who never graduated the academy or even attended, but with Minato on the verge of taking his jonin exams he was rarely treated like a child.

 

However, to this man, that’s what he was. A fourteen-year-old boy going on fifteen, someone who, by his standards, should be in the academy taking courses. A glance at Uzumaki, jaw hanging open and eyes wide, she was having just as hard of a time coming to grips with this as he was.

 

“What types of electives?” Tobirama asked, leaning forward and a glint of anticipation in his red eyes (eyes, that Minato now noticed, seemed to make Dumbledore slightly nervous).

 

“Care of Magical Creatures, Divination, Study of Ancient Runes, Arithmancy, and Muggle Studies.”

 

Care of magical creatures? What did that even mean, taking care of nin cats or getting summons? Was he talking about the glowing bird in the corner, even now glowing like embers recently stirred in a dying fireplace. In fact, Minato wasn’t sure half of those were even English words, certainly none that Lee had ever said to him in the decade they’d known each other.

 

Lee, finally, spoke, “Which of those is the least useless?”

 

The nidaime, again, hit her on the back of her head and hissed out in Minato’s native language, “ _Honestly, can you not contain yourself for a half hour?!_ ”

 

“I think what Lee, I mean Ellie, means to say,” the shodaime said rather awkwardly with a stretched grin, “Is that we’d like to take all of them if we could.”

 

Dumbledore laughed and shook his head, thoroughly entertained by this apparently, “Oh, no, I’m afraid there isn’t time for that. Only two for each along with the regular course work.”

 

There wasn’t much time for negotiating after this, just a few minutes of hammering out the details of each specific course and who would take which. Arithmancy was essentially the mathematics behind fuinjutsu, runes the application of fuinjutsu itself, divination the art of using strange blood limits and jutsus to see the future, care of magical creatures exactly what it said on the tin, and muggle studies the study of civilians and their habits.

 

Which… Minato found very odd, either it was a course on intelligence gathering, on how to observe civilians and their motivations, or it was something even more foreign than that. As if the wizards and witches here were so divorced from their civilian counterparts that they couldn’t even comprehend their lives or motivation, to the point where they needed a year long course to understand.

 

Which left Minato and Uzumaki in the obvious two courses of Arithmancy and Ancient Runes, Haru thrown into Muggle Studies and Care of Magical Creatures, and Lee picking up the slack with Divination and Care of Magical Creatures.

 

Which…

 

Minato and Kushina had looked at each other when this was decided, their names with English characters etched out in black ink on the schedules for the courses, and it had been clear that this wasn’t what either of them had had in mind.

 

From there, since they hadn’t brought their own lodgings (as the Durmstrang students and faculty apparently had decided to live on a boat in the lake the whole year) they were to be housed in something called the Gryffindor tower.

 

That is, Minato, Kushina, Haru, and Lee were going to be doing this, Minato and Haru separated onto the boy’s side of the dorm with Kushina and Lee on the other. The nidaime and shodaime, apparently, would be having their own quarters somewhere else in the castle.

 

“You must be joking,” Lee blurted, eyes wide and leaning over the desk, apparently now far past her own internal limit, “Separating like that in a foreign country is suicide or at least the height of stupidity.”

 

It said a lot, Minato thought, that the nidaime didn’t even think to reprimand her for that one. Minato didn’t disagree either, and not just because he had missed rooming with Lee all those months on the road, but just because it was, well, stupid.

 

Dumbledore grimaced then said, “I’m afraid, Miss Potter, that that’s simply how this is done. Had you arrived sooner Hogwarts could have set up something more appropriate to your needs but…”

 

“You assholes summoned me!” Lee balked, “If it was up to me I wouldn’t be here at all!”

 

“I am aware of this, Miss Potter, and believe me the matter is being investigated,” Dumbledore said, quite gravely, seeming to be at least partially aware that someone having any kind of stranglehold on Lee’s chakra was not a good thing.

 

“I’m actually with Lee, I mean Ellie, on this one,” Kushina then added with a too casual shrug, “Even if it gets me out of our blonde princess Minato’s pretty hair, splitting up like that seems like a pretty bad idea. Especially since this probably is a kidnapping attempt or something, believe it.”

 

“ _Why must you take every opportunity to insult me?_ ” Minato asked under his breath only to earn a cheeky and delighted grin from Uzumaki.

 

“ _Because you deserve it, and we’re probably not going to get a chance for round two in the_ jonin _exams if we’re all stuck here so I have to get my digs in while I can. Believe it!_ ”

 

Oh, Minato always believed it, every single goddamn time.

 

“None the less,” Dumbledore said, again grimacing and almost looking pained as he said every word, “Given the short timing, and the fact that I’ve never heard of your country before today and couldn’t possibly get the ministry to verify whatever lodgings you bring, I have to insist.”

 

Then with schedules handed out, something called a prefect summoned, they were all down the stairs once more and chauffeured to their new living quarters and this strange brave civilian new world they had found themselves in.

 

Yet, all Minato could think as he looked at the schedule, was that at least most of the classes aside from those two he shared with Lee (even if he also shared them with Uzumaki). Somehow, in the strangest of ways, they were reclaiming those lost academy days that Minato sometimes couldn’t help but miss when the idea of miles and miles between them had been inconceivable.

 

* * *

 

Now, Uzumaki Kushina understood the need to worship at the chaotic altar that was Lee as much as the next person. Sure, Lee had her flaws, such as her strange worship in turn of that bastard Namikaze Minato, but on the whole Lee was not only badass but everything Kushina wanted in life and Kushina had known it since she was ten.

 

Even Minato, flakey bastard that he was, had an unnervingly high respect for Lee and everything she did. Pretty much everyone did if they had any sense, you didn’t have to like Lee, but you did have to admit that she could probably crush you like a bug beneath her sandal if she felt like it.

 

Still, on stepping into the Gryffindor tower after giving the password to the talking painting of the fat lady and having it swing open into something called a common room, even Kushina had to admit that this was downright weird.

 

Well, the room itself was goddamn weird. The entire place was red and gold, plush antique furniture everywhere, and was wealthier looking than even the main Uzumaki household in Uzushio had been. Everything screamed not only civilian but entirely too much money, looking upwards, Kushina thought she could see gold leaf decorating the edges of the ceiling.

 

It was also filled with the overaged academy students all clamoring clumsily towards them, towards Lee, and surrounding her on all sides as they reached out for her forehead and babbling in English.

 

“Ellie Potter, are you really Ellie Potter?”

 

“Where have you been this whole time, Ellie?”

 

“Were you hiding in Japan?”

 

“Are you going to attend Hogwarts now?”

 

“Do you have the scar, is it beneath the headband?”

 

It took Lee a wide-eyed, panicked and claustrophobic, second a half before she sent them all flying into the wall.

 

At that there was a truly awkward, painful, silence as they looked at her in dismay and even betrayal. Like they weren’t expecting her to go and do that the second they started mobbing. Which, she hadn’t even thrown them that hard, they were barely even bruised.

 

“ _The hell was that?_ ” Dead Last asked, probably having been hopelessly lost during all of that, and probably all the meeting before too (he’d been doing a lot of smiling and nodding), but nobody had any answer to that if only because Kushina had no clue either.

 

Just that Lee, to these people, apparently was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Which, she was (not that Kushina herself wasn’t either) but she hadn’t expected these people to all know that without even talking to her.

 

“So,” Kushina said, clapping her hands together when it became entirely too awkward, “My name’s Kushina Uzumaki, and I’m amazing, _ninja_ Jesus over here is Lee Eru, I guess you call her Ellie Potter, the entirely too pretty blonde is Minato Namikaze, and the other one is Haru Matsuda but you can call him Dead Last.”

 

Haru’s brow furrowed, he glared over at Kushina, and asked uncertainly, “ _Did you just say that they could call me Dead Last?_ ”

 

“ _Well, it is your name, Dead Last,_ ” Lee said with a rather awkward and stiff shrug, eyes still locked on the smattering of students now all picking themselves up off the floor and brushing themselves off.

 

“ _It is not my name, Lee! It’s never been my name!_ ” he hissed, which, damn, Kushina didn’t know if it was just because of his alarming ancient Uzumaki appearance (what with the white hair and the dark eyes that almost made him look like a relative of Tobirama’s) but their new academy friends all looked fairly intimidated by that.

 

Which, Kushina at this point couldn’t even imagine being remotely intimidated by Dead Last of all people.

 

“Anyways, we’re going to have a few ground rules, like personal space. Personal space is good, not acknowledging personal space leads to bad things, believe it,” Kushina said with a grin, to which, a tiny eleven or twelve-year-old raised his hand and asked, “What kind of bad things?”

 

“Death or maiming,” Kushina said, and at his sudden wide-eyed look of horror she added an obligatory, “Believe it.”

 

“ _Excellent job terrorizing the children, Uzumaki,_ ” Minato said rather drily, in his entirely too Minato manner for Kushina to handle, but she was going to ignore him this once in favor of laying down some ground rules.

 

“Also important is the respecting of private property, snooping in other people’s things also leads to death and or maiming, and I’m really saying that you better believe it!” Kushina said, certainly her stuff was all trapped with fuinjutsu up the wazoo and she was sure Minato’s and Lee’s things were as well. Now, whether Dead Last was prepared for something like that was anyone’s guess but even his stuff could probably have some nasty consequences for civilians poking around.

 

Kushina then faltered, looked over towards Lee, “ _Do we have any other ground rules?_ ”

 

Lee just shrugged only for Minato to sigh, shake his head, and say, “ _Not that I can think of but I’m sure you’ll come up with something._ ”

 

Oh god, those classes with him and without Lee as a buffer were going to be absolute hell. Still, she could almost grin with anticipation, she’d crush him like a sad little bug because Namikaze might be a genius but fuinjutsu was in Kushina’s goddamn blood. It wasn’t quite the same as getting the chance to beat the shit out of him in front of a crowd but it was close enough for now.

 

“So, any questions?” Kushina asked, placing her hands on her hips and grinning. For a very long time there was nothing, just blinking and staring and rubbing at eyes.

 

Finally coughed awkwardly, a pudgy mousey looking boy around their age, and he stepped towards them with hesitation and an uncomfortable grimace, “Um, a few, I’m Neville by the way, Neville Longbottom but I…”

 

He trailed off, glanced over his shoulder towards a busy haired girl and a lanky red-head who were now stepping up with him, then at getting their nods of encouragement turned his eyes over to Lee and asked almost desperately, “Where have you been, Ellie?”

 

“ _Konoha_ ,” Lee said shortly, almost surprised, as if it had never occurred to her to be anywhere else.

 

It was like she’d gone and slapped him, he stiffened, flushed, then rambled out, “Oh, I mean… Everyone’s been looking for you for ages and I just thought…”

 

“Not hard enough,” Lee interjected with a rather amused smile, like she thought that was just a little bit funny which… Kushina didn’t know much about Lee’s background, not as much as Minato at any rate, but she did know that wherever Lee had lived before Konoha it hadn’t been good. Had been bad enough, even, that every moment she stood here seemed to cause her physical pain.

 

If it hadn’t been ordered by the hokage himself, Kushina thought, Lee probably wouldn’t be here at all.

 

“What Neville means is, you being the girl who lived, there was quite a fuss when you didn’t show up in September for Hogwarts for your first year,” the bushy hair girl said with far more confidence and curiosity than her mousey peer, who was starting to look and act like the Dead Last of England if Kushina thought about it, “Everyone’s been wondering where you went for ages, years really. Were you in Japan? I don’t know much about Japanese but whatever you speak sounds like it and your clothes look something like it as well although I had no idea there were magical _ninja_ in Japan…”

 

“Just _shinobi_ ,” Lee said with a bit of a grimace at the girl’s enthusiasm, “Sans the magic, and not Japan either, just _Konoha_.”

 

The girl’s brow furrowed, she glanced at their hands suddenly, searching for something and gasped slightly, “You don’t have wands! Are you… are you muggles? But no, that can’t be right, otherwise you couldn’t be inside the castle…”

 

“Wands?” Lee asked, red eyebrows rising beneath her headband as the girl motioned to her stick.

 

“All wizards and witches use wands to perform spells,” the girl said, and suddenly Kushina had the feeling that this was the sort of person who lived for explaining things to others in a way that even Minato didn’t, “Of course, wandless magic is possible, and accidental magic happens all the time when people are younger, but for any real spell you need a wand.”

 

“Oh, we can do the _chakra_ thing, if that’s what you’re asking,” Lee said with a dismissive wave of her hand, “Just not with the wood stick.”

 

The girl’s eyes sparked, curiosity burning in them as she leaned forward, now entirely too close, “Really? Oh, you’ll have to show me some _Konoha_ spells and…”

 

Minato interrupted her, “You mentioned something about Lee, I mean Ellie, earlier, something about a girl who lived?”

 

At this there was lots of wild whispering again, people staring at Lee again and looking at each other then back at Lee as if just staring at her could tell them something very important. The girl, for her own part, suddenly looked awkward, “Well, sure, it’s in all the history books published in the last ten years. Eleanor Lily Potter is the girl who lived, the only person to ever survive the killing curse, and was responsible for the death of You Know Who when he tried to kill her.”

 

“I know who?” Minato asked, clearly having no idea who this was supposed to be, not that Kushina did either for that matter.

 

“Well, He Who Must Not Be Named,” the girl finished, then, looking even more uncertain and awkward she asked, “Have you not… Have you never heard about that?”

 

Not as far as Kushina knew, though she supposed it wasn’t surprising, Lee surviving some kind of death jutsu and then blowing up some guy who couldn’t be named. That was practically a day in the life of Lee, if Kushina thought about it.

 

Then Lee seemed to get it, her eyes widened, and she slammed hand down on her palm, “ _Oh my god, she’s talking about the_ English _shinobi!”_

 

“ _What, really?_ ” Kushina asked, which, she guessed the guy’s chakra had been in Lee’s head forever, and he was English, but she hadn’t put two and two together with this.

 

“ _He said as much even when we first pulled him out of my head,_ ” Lee said, eyes now burning, “ _We’d just always assumed that he was competent and clearly had intended to stick his chakra in my brain. I can’t believe he just blew himself up!_ ”

 

“ _Well, these people could be wrong, Lee,_ ” Minato said after a considering pause, clearly willing to believe in the English shinobi’s competence rather than on random civilians being right about something like that but Lee was always willing to believe the worst of poor Ren.

 

Poor, poor, Ren forever on house arrest with his chakra sealed away by the best fuinjutsu masters in all the land. Even now suffering under the sanin’s joint tender love and care which translated to porn from the pervy sage, booze from the slug princess, and creepiness from Orochimaru.

 

It got progressively more awkward after that. Apparently, it wasn’t okay to not know who but asking about who was even worse. Soon enough the crowd was dispersing, giving them all wide space, and leaving them awkwardly behind with promises from busy haired Granger Hermione that she’d show them to classes tomorrow morning.

 

Oh, and that the instructor Snape Severus was an ass and would probably do his best to make them cry because he “hated Gryffindors” whatever the hell a Gryffindor even was supposed to be.

 

“ _So,_ ” Kushina said when it was just the four of them left, “ _I guess you guys go your way and Lee and I go ours._ ”

 

Minato looked particularly pained by that, probably because he’d been living with Lee since the dawn of time, and as far as Kushina knew this was the first time without a mission that they were voluntarily separating into two separate sides of a building. Which, really, Kushina wouldn’t speak for Minato but Lee deserved to not be so codependent on that guy.

 

And it’d be great girl time! Sure, Mikoto wasn’t here, but Lee and Kushina barely got a chance to hang around each other even with Minato out of the village all the time. It’d be like the greatest slumber party ever that never ended.

 

Haru was just giving her this flat sort of look though, like he’d figured out all her plans and was not impressed. Which, really, Kushina didn’t even have plans!

 

“ _Later, losers, see you at breakfast,_ ” Kushina said, grabbing Lee by the arm and carting her up the tower steps with their backpacks in tow and more than ready to take England and Gryffindor by storm. If only someone would sit down and explain what a Gryffindor was.

 

* * *

 

It was entirely too quiet.

 

No, that wasn’t true, it was anything but quiet.

 

Though the room given to Tobirama and his brother was small and soundproofed by dozens upon dozens of seals, just like the rest of the castle it was buzzing with barely restrained chakra in what had to be thousands upon thousands of seals and residual ninjutsu in the walls and Tobirama could already feel a migraine beginning to settle in beneath his forehead.

 

Still, it was too quiet in the metaphorical sense of Tobirama and Hashirama were on one side of the castle and Eru Lee was up somewhere in a tower with no jonin supervision. Which, Tobirama supposed she was a chunin and by right of earning that vest had earned some faith in her decision making. However, Tobirama also knew that the vest had mostly been earned via raw power alone, Lee hated England, and if he waited too long he and Hashirama were liable to find the tower burned down.

 

Or, perhaps, this was the opportunity the English had been waiting for, they’d ambush the girl now rather than wait for this tournament of theirs on the 24th of November, and then Lee would undoubtedly burn down the tower and the castle in retaliation causing a major diplomatic incident.

 

True, it’d be a diplomatic incident with a country that had had the gall to attempt to kidnap or assassinate a jonin, but a goddamn diplomatic incident none the less.

 

“Are you going to sit down, Tobi?” Hashirama asked, sipping tea like everything was perfectly fine, grinning ear to ear.

 

“No,” Tobirama said, still in the middle of pacing and thinking, and wondering what else there was to do and if he’d missed anything.

 

As far as research and taking advantage of it went he didn’t think he was in the wrong to spread out their chunin among the different courses (of course leaving Lee to her own devices in Divination was questionable but Tobirama highly doubted the rest of them had the necessary blood limits to get anything out of it). More, he’d have to dig into the history of this place, visit London and their shopping district as Dumbledore Albus had recommended, pick up wands for each of them along with books and track down the Potter clan wherever it had disappeared to.

 

The clan which, according to Ren at least, Lee herself was the heir and last surviving member of, set to inherit a vast fortune and collection of family techniques stored in ancient tomes. Not to mention whatever this plot was, whatever the reason for placing this hold on Lee’s chakra, was sure to come into play sooner or later and Tobirama would prefer to be prepared for that sooner rather than later.

 

Point being, they were only a few hours in and there was already too much to do and goddamn him, Hashirama was just sitting there!

 

“Tobi, come sit down, have some tea whatever you’re…”

 

“I am far too busy for tea, Hashirama!” Tobirama snapped, however, at seeing his older brother’s wide eyes and almost offended expression on the verge of tears (as always) Tobirama sighed and collapsed into his seat.

 

“I don’t think I like this,” Tobirama finally confessed, rubbing at his temples with a sigh, “I feel very out of sorts.”

 

“Now you know how the rest of us feel,” Hashirama said with a grin, “Come on Tobi, it’s an adventure.”

 

“It’s a kidnapping or assassination attempt,” Tobirama scoffed, which, Hashirama shrugged and didn’t exactly deny as it was hardly a polite invitation that Lee had received, or one that she could be expected to turn down.

 

“Still, isn’t it strange? It’s just like Ren said, like Lee said, these people have chakra but they’re not shinobi,” Hashirama said in awe, “Not monks and not shinobi either, but just civilians who have chakra and use it for all sorts of things. You know, they all said I was mad, but even I couldn’t imagine something like this.”

 

Tobirama couldn’t help the fond smile on his lips, “No, none of us, I think, were quite this ambitious.”

 

He still wasn’t, somehow, sad as that was. After only a few hours the pleasant veneer of chakra wielding civilians stayed intact, true, but he kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. A world without war, or at least, without shinobi clans at war was just so inconceivable that even when it stared him in the face he simply couldn’t trust it.

 

And if it was real, he thought to himself, then how had they managed it when in five-hundred years the element nations couldn’t?

 

How had they managed to escape the cycle of war, violence, and death when even Hashirama had not been able to?

 

He sighed again, tried to put depressing and meandering thoughts like that out of his head, and instead with an almost fond smile he said, “Lee’s going to burn this place to the ground.”

 

“What?” Hashirama asked, spluttering, “What makes you say that?”

 

“Oh, she will,” Tobirama said, not even bothering to answer his brother’s question, “It’s just a matter of time, really. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens tomorrow, or she does something else that shakes this place down to its foundations.”

 

“Oh, come on, Tobi,” Hashirama said, looking oddly offended on Lee’s behalf, “She’s not that bad.”

 

It wasn’t a matter of her being bad, Tobirama thought, it was just something intrinsic to who she was. Just like she’d flipped Konoha upside down she would unwittingly do the same with this place. It was just in who she was, always too outside of the box to remember where the boundaries were in the first place.

 

So, he just chuckled, picking up the now cold cup of tea in front of him and sipping from it, “The question is, should I stick around and wait for it to happen or leave it to you to deal with the fallout?”

 

“To me?” Hashirama said, and then, with a somewhat affronted expression (which always looked so out of place on his normally open features), “You know, Tobi, I was hokage and probably overqualified for this sort of thing.”

 

“Well, I need to head into this _London_ , the sooner the better, and if you’re up to the challenge of keeping the children in line then more power to you,” Tobirama said, though something in him hesitated to refer to any of them, even Haru, as children. Generally, even when you were only a genin, childhood shuttered close.

 

The starry-eyed look of academy graduates never lasted too long out in the field, not after the first time they were forced to kill someone.

 

No, it was a long time since any of them had been children, and even juxtaposing the rest of their little team against the students here it was painfully obvious. You could tell by their eyes alone, which of them had held kunai and which hadn’t.

 

“Just make sure they don’t burn down the castle and village,” Tobirama said, “I’ve heard Lee has a history of doing that.”

 

Although Lee would, as usual, blame her mysterious plant zombies for that venture. Not that anyone, even Tobirama, had seen any of them since that second mission to retrieve Tsunade.

 

“It’s like you have no faith in any of us, Tobi,” Hashirama said, crossing his arms now with a pout, and Tobirama wondered if he should point out that it was because he didn’t have faith in them. Well, that he had enough faith to consider leaving the castle but not enough to be surprised if he returned to find that Hogwarts somehow had been burnt to a crisp.

 

Instead though, he noted, “If it makes you feel better, then I think the _English_ have enough faith for all of us combined.”

 

Granted, it could be an act, but if it was then it was a good one. They were like, well, wealthy civilians who had never seen bandits or border conflict. The idea of danger, the threat of death, did not enter their small worlds or at least not this castle. They lacked fear, lacked precaution, and that alone was shown by the fact that only Tobirama and Hashirama were separated out while they’d stuck the rest of them into a student dormitory.

 

Not just stuck them there but insisted on it.

 

And they were lucky, Tobirama thought, that they didn’t want trouble because that kind of naivete had terrible consequences. He was at once, he thought, reminded of Hashirama so many years ago who had insisted on seeing the good inside of Uchiha Madara. Except, even then, Hashirama had not been so foolish and blind as that.

 

The war, the civil war and revolution, the one Ren mentioned and longed for trapped as he was in Konohagakure, suddenly hung like a cloud in Tobirama’s mind.

 

“Mito would have liked this,” Hashirama said quietly, jarring Tobirama’s thoughts.

 

Hashirama stared into this tea, oddly somber and his expression at once something nostalgic, yearning, and bittersweet, “She was so adventurous, in a way, both in marrying into our clan and building Konoha. She was like you, she doubted, but she went and supported me anyway… She would have liked to see this place, I think.”

 

Mito, she probably wouldn’t have been able to come, even as Kushina somehow could Mito, old and with the fox in her stomach, wouldn’t have. Still, with his own smile, he couldn’t help but agree, “Yes, she probably would have found it fascinating.”

 

The castle alone, the seals, would have engrossed her for days…

 

But Mito wasn’t living on the same borrowed time that Hashirama and Tobirama were, now relics of an age gone by, stuck here at Lee’s unwitting whims. And while she could be, perhaps, neither Hashirama nor Tobirama had the selfishness, the hypocrisy, or perhaps the will to ask Lee to do the same for Uzumaki Mito that she had once done for them.

 

Because, as Hashirama had once said, then where would it stop? If it started with Uzumaki Mito, then where would it ever end?

 

Still, he missed her, so many had passed through to the other side, comrades, friends, and the entire village of Uzushio and all the Uzumaki with them. Soon enough there would be no one left that Tobirama had known from his first time through life. And then where would he and his brother be?

 

All the same, there was a time for the living and a time for the dead. He’d go into London tomorrow, he’d find the Potter clan, Lee’s relatives the Dursleys, he’d find the books, the wands, and all of the history of this place and leave his brother to it and the pure world to the departed.

 

That, and ignoring his blinding headache, were about the only things he could do.


	29. Breakfast in Hogwarts

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A great thanks to GlassGirlCeci on fanfiction.net for betaing the chapter.

_In which Minato meets his latest and greatest rival, Lee reenacts her meeting with Orochimaru with one Severus Snape, and Tobirama contemplates Lee's mysterious past and letting sleeping dragons lie._

* * *

 

"What… is this?" Haru stared at his breakfast in a cross between frustration and despair, wondering if this really was going to be his life for the next six months. Now, that said, it wasn't as if all of it was completely unrecognizable.

There were waffles, pancakes, strips of bacon… Granted, it was the sort of food that Haru would probably vomit if he tried to eat it first thing in the morning and then do any kind of training or work, but it wasn't as alien as you could expect, given that it was from the bona fide land of Lee.

However, some of it was…

On his plate, this second, there was what looked like a toad made from butter, staring at him with dark blinking eyes that might be lentils, sitting inside the hole of a bagel and croaking ominously. Haru, personally, preferred it when his food didn't croak at him.

The toad hopped out of its hole and onto his bagel, leaving a trail of watery yellow slime-butter. Looking across tables, he saw one of the English civilian students around his age, an overly large bulky boy with a green and silver tie, vivisecting his own butter-toad breakfast with an alarming gusto that might just put an Akimichi to shame.

He felt himself pale with disgust, very likely turning an interesting shade of green. "I'm going to starve."

His frog breakfast croaked once in agreement.

"Try sticking to the toast," Minato said drily as he scraped what was probably strawberry jam onto a small stack of crispy toast, "It, at least, doesn't move."

As usual, Haru couldn't help but think that given the circumstances, Namikaze Minato looked entirely too put together. Here he was, only just back in the village after months on the road, and he seemed perfectly fine being in a foreign country with a foreign language and very foreign breakfast items. He'd just set up his things the night before, amiably chatted to their new English roommates and warned them not to touch his stuff or face certain death (except he said it in that charming Minato way that made it seem less alarming than when Uzumaki had just laid it out there), and now was preparing his breakfast with one hand and reading through his new English textbook with another.

The textbook that Haru had flipped through and then discarded in despair upon realizing that he could barely make it through a paragraph.

Because, suddenly, the difference between "chop" and "dice" seemed very important, and Haru hoped he wasn't reading "eye of newt" correctly for something that was supposed to be drunk for medicinal purposes.

Or, given his breakfast, just for the hell of it.

"Why would anyone want chakra in their breakfast?" Haru asked, motioning to his animate breakfast, which clearly had to have been created by some sort of catastrophe of fuinjutsu, ninjutsu, or something that should have been a forbidden technique.

Mianto spared him a pale, raised eyebrow, which wasn't much considering he didn't even look up from his newly acquired Potions textbook. "Haru, if you haven't noticed, these people enjoy chakra in their everything."

Haru sighed, supposing Minato had a point, what with the moving staircases, the chattering portraits, the animate furniture…

Haru was about to respond to that, that there was still a difference between feeling the need to put chakra in your chair and putting it in your goddamn cereal, but was interrupted by the arrival of Uzumaki and Lee plopping down beside them and, a few seconds after the dynamic duo, the bushy haired girl from the night before, her slightly stockier pudgy friend, and then the lanky ginger.

Lanky ginger wasted no time between sitting down and reaching over to the piles of food on the table, specifically to the small pond of butter-toads, and began dumping them on his plate and stuffing them in his face. " _Cor, toads in a hole! They never have this stuff!_ "

At least, that was what Haru thought he said. It was more than a little difficult to tell, what with it being a) in English and with a far different accent than Lee's or even the English shinobi's and b) said with his face stuffed with bread and buttery limbs.

Haru looked away, breathing in and out rapidly and reminding himself that he'd have to get used to this, because they weren't going to send him home and he had to eat sometime.

"Sweet Jesus, Dead Last, you've hunted your dinner and you can't handle breakfast," Lee said, giving him that derisive and unimpressed look that he was so very familiar with.

"That is not the same!" he said as he dutifully attempted not to hurl. Now, given that, he wasn't sure why it wasn't the same, as he'd gotten over that squeamishness ages ago, but this was just something else altogether.

" _Honestly, Ronald, chew first then speak,_ " bushy haired girl reprimanded the ginger with long-suffering exasperation (Ronald or Ron Haru now remembered from the previous night) before turning her attention to the rest of them.

Ron spared her an annoyed glance and a pair of rolled eyes. " _It's fine, Mione, I'm not bloody five._ "

At least, again, that's what Haru thought he said, but given that he was inclined to chew and speak, Haru was having a really hard time following. As it had been when Ron and… Neville, Haru thought it was Neville, had started talking to them in the dorm the night before, Haru had mostly had to smile and nod and pray that Minato could hold up the conversation.

Which, of course, Minato had, but whatever he'd learned about the school, Lee, or anything else, he had yet to tell Haru.

And once again, Haru couldn't help but notice the eerie amount of attention focused on them. Well, not just them, but Lee specifically. There was blatant staring, whispering, talking, and a kind of hyper focus on Lee that Haru hadn't seen since all the girls who would giggle at Uchiha Fugaku.

Which, Haru was really hoping it wasn't for the same reasons that academy fangirls had been interested in Uchiha Fugaku.

Now, he'd probably been told why the night before and it had just been in, well, rapid-fire English, but whatever it was he still didn't quite… Get it.

"Lee," he said, whispering over to her now that their English friends seemed suitably distracted by bickering at each other, "Do you… Why is everyone staring at you?"

Lee gave him a particularly unimpressed look as she reached into Minato's tower of toast and took one. "According to 'Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts in the 20th Century', I really am Wizard Jesus."

"You're what?" Haru asked, a little louder and with a little more panic, as it was a typical Lee answer to a question that really needed answering.

However, Lee didn't get a chance to clarify, as Ron and… Mione's morning ritual of bickering appeared to be done and their attention was back on them. Or, if Haru wanted to be specific, back on Eru Lee. Oh sure, Haru was glanced at with his alarmingly white hair, along with Minato and Uzumaki, but it was Lee who really held their attention.

Not just their attention either, but a sort of stunned awe that was, well…

Not the kind of look that Haru would give someone like Eru Lee.

" _So, do you have the… you know?_ " Ron asked, motioning to his forehead and looking at Lee meaningfully. He ignored the way that Neville and Hermione both glared at him, elbowing him in the ribs and hissing out some reprimand.

Except they didn't look entirely disinterested either.

" _You know, the scar,_ " Ron insisted, now leaning forward over the table as if that would help him see underneath her headband.

Lee, with a barely alert and unimpressed grunt, lifted her headband and hair away from her forehead to reveal the nidaime's seal work, as well as a faded scar in the shape of a lightning bolt. The English shinobi's seal, the nidaime had always said, such a simple character capable of such catastrophe.

They blinked, looking closer even as Lee pushed her hair and headband back down into place and resumed eating her piece of toast.

" _That was…_ " Neville said at first, but the girl spoke over top of him.

" _What is that?_ " Mione asked, or was it Hermione, Haru honestly couldn't remember, " _All the books say that it was in the shape of a lightning bolt. And were those tattoos over it? They didn't look like any runes I've ever studied…_ "

The girl continued to blather, apparently not minding that Lee was just sort of dully staring at her with raised eyebrows and absolutely no intention of answering. For his own part, Minato continued to be consumed by his Potions, or else glaring over at Uzumaki who, like usual, was making herself way too comfortable sitting next to Lee.

Haru glanced around at this strange place and met the eyes of the nidaime and shodaime, both sitting at the staff table. The nidaime looked bored to death by some professor chattering in his ear, while the shodaime continued to look fascinated by just about everything. As for himself, Haru felt… He didn't know; it was such a strange place, almost like being in a dream, really.

Like he kept looking around at the food, the ceiling, everything, and thinking he was going to wake up from that nap any second now…

Another, unfamiliar, voice jarred him from his thoughts.

" _I can't believe Dumbledore had the nerve to stick Eleanor Potter with the Gryffindorks._ "

Haru turned along with everyone else to see a boy around their age, dressed to the nines in English robes that looked like the high-quality fabric that only a clan like the Uchiha could afford, with pale blonde hair, pale complexion, and a sneering expression of arrogance as he tilted his nose down at them. On his right and left just behind him were two hulking figures who looked like they were honestly just there for intimidation.

" _Malfoy,_ " Ron hissed, face growing red in anger and swallowing his food as he shouted, " _The bloody hell do you want?!_ "

" _Easy, Weasel, I just thought I should let Potter know that it's not just muggle-loving riff-raff, muggleborns, and squibs here at Hogwarts._ " At this, his eyes moved from Ron, to Hermione, to Neville, as if each of these words was a knife in their specific gut.

Haru, though, just squinted and repeated the words in his head and failed to come up with any meaning. The way he was saying them made them sound pretty vulgar, and some of them sounded… somewhat familiar from the English shinobi's tirades, but he honestly had no idea what that sentence even meant.

 _"Lay off, Ferret! Ellie Potter wants nothing to do with you!_ "

There was then some even more rapid-fire back and forth of what Haru assumed was them trading nasty insults with one another. Still, he couldn't help but glance at Uzumaki and ask, "I… Are they really fighting over… Lee?"

Because in what universe did anyone besides Uzumaki and Minato fight over Lee's attention? What kind of a parallel hell-dimension had he just willingly entered? Glancing at Lee, he suddenly remembered that this was the island where she was born. That explained a lot.

Uzumaki, as always, seemed to be living for the chaos sprouting around her. She watched the back and forth in avid glee, as now the bushy haired girl was getting into it by reprimanding them both and spitting fire over at the blonde. "Oh yeah, but I think Lee's just the excuse. They're really just here to trash one another's clans Senju and Uchiha style. Well, you know, Senju-Uchiha style after the clan wars and all the butchering was over."

"I feel so loved and respected," Lee said drily as she continued to eat her breakfast, looking, as usual, more than done with this place and just itching to teleport back to Konoha already.

"Their clans?"

"Weasley Ron, here," Kushina said, motioning over to the oblivious Ron who was now standing and daring to put a hand on Lee's shoulder in a sense of camaraderie, "Is from a fairly large clan, the Weasleys, who according to Malfoy are known for two things: red-headed children and being dirt poor."

She then motioned to Malfoy, who now was putting his own hand on Lee's other open shoulder in a sense of camaraderie greater than or equal to Weasley's. "This is Malfoy Draco. According to Weasley, he's from the Malfoy clan, which is known for buying off corrupt government officials, rolling in dirty money, inbreeding, and being racist dicks."

"They're saying it just like that?!" Haru asked, because even the Uchiha and Hyuga weren't that… well, blatant with their mutual hatred of one another. Uzumaki might come out and say something to that effect, but that was Uzumaki, who prided herself on her complete lack of tact.

"Considering that I'm pretty sure Malfoy is attempting to heavy-handedly seduce Lee, I don't think these people know the meaning of tact," Minato said, ignoring the way Haru spluttered and gagged and nearly collapsed on top of the table at the very thought of it.

Seduce Lee, attempting to seduce Lee, oh god why? Why would anyone ever…

Although that would explain the now low-grade killing intent coming off Minato as he glared at Malfoy's hand on Lee's shoulder. Or the fact that Malfoy's hand was still on Lee's shoulder, squeezing it gently, and looking down at her in clear interest of something…

Minato softly, gently, closed his book with that eerie strained smile he got that always belied the sudden influx of killing intent. He turned to look up at Malfoy, grinning entirely too cheerfully, and asked, " _While it's very kind of you to introduce yourself, Mr. Malfoy, don't you want to eat breakfast before class starts?_ "

Malfoy paused, Weasley with him, and both looked down blinking at Minato as if they only just remembered there were other people at this table. Minato, for his own part, simply insisted with a palpable spike of killing intent, " _You wouldn't want it to get cold, would you?_ "

Any competent shinobi, Haru thought, would have enough presence of mind to know that it was past time to leave. Malfoy, apparently, was not a competent shinobi. He just stared uneasily down at Minato, undoubtedly feeling at least some of the killing intent (which was hardly that impressive given how thick Minato was laying it on for him), and said slowly, " _Right, you're from that Japanese school Potter goes to… You are the right sort, aren't you?_ "

Minato didn't answer, simply allowed his smile to slip and a terrible blankness to take its place. Far too calmly he said, " _Malfoy, go eat your breakfast._ "

Malfoy opened his mouth, closed it, and then began to walk away towards the green and silver table with an awkward, " _Yes, Potter, we'll talk in Potions, after breakfast…_ "

Minato just smiled to himself, opened his book to where he'd left, and continued to eat his breakfast like nothing had happened.

"I could have handled that, you know," Lee pointed out with what sounded like a mildly exasperated sigh, but Minato just smiled fondly and shook his head.

"I know, but this was more… satisfying," Minato said, pausing before the word as if he had to think of the perfect one to describe what had just happened.

And was it just Haru, or had Minato come back from training with Jiraiya twelve times scarier than when he'd left?

Weasley slowly, in amazed awe, said, " _That was bloody awesome. You've got to teach me how to do that!_ "

So it was just Haru, apparently, or at least (with a glance towards Uzumaki) Haru and anyone even remotely sane from Konoha. Suddenly he couldn't help but think that Namikaze Minato was going to eat these idiots alive.

* * *

Apparently, Potions class was held with the Slytherins. The night before, as Weasley had ranted and raved and Longbottom had nodded dutifully, this hadn't seemed that important of a fact. Hogwarts apparently had a system of dividing its students into four different dormitories and schedules, with a student following this group of peers through classes and rooming with them for all seven years of their schooling.

What Minato found a bit odd was, rather than try to balance out a group of students, as one might a genin team, they were instead grouped together based on similar personality traits told to them by a talking hat. And it really was a talking hat; Minato had asked twice about that, and neither Weasley nor Longbottom had looked all that alarmed by the idea that it was a talking, chakra infused hat that looked into their mindscape to decide which goddamn dorm to place them in.

Gryffindor, Konoha's new home away from home, prided itself on bravery, valor, and nobility, with a lion as their mascot. Slytherin, the opposing house, on cunning and ambition, with a cobra on their banner.

Being sorted into Slytherin as opposed to Gryffindor was, apparently, a very large deal.

Truth told, even in the morning, after having skimmed "Hogwarts: A History" loaned to him by Granger Hermione the night before, he wasn't sure he still cared. He found it… an odd system of doing things. A little unbalanced, given that a shinobi needed both the will of fire as well as cunning to live any kind of meaningful or long life, but nothing worth paying attention to. Getting a start on Potions and the rest of the English disciplines, as well as wondering if maybe they shouldn't just skip classes today and go get their wands instead of waiting for the next day off, had seemed far more important.

It only irked him now as he realized that Slytherin was apparently synonymous with Malfoy Draco, and that he'd be spending every Potions and Defense Against the Dark Arts class watching some fourteen-year-old English smarmy academy student go and make eyes at Lee, as if there was nothing that his money had ever failed to buy him.

It shouldn't have irked him. He'd dealt with plenty of obnoxious people over the years and had no problem with it. Every clan had at least one Malfoy Draco inside of it who thought blood limits and money were all they ever truly needed. The academy had been filled with branch member Uchihas and Hyugas who had been almost morally offended that Namikaze Minato, a first-generation, orphan, immigrant from Wind could so easily surpass them. Although they usually learned their place either during the academy or after graduation; clans did not suffer needless and insulting arrogance, and those who refused to learn tended to quickly end up dead.

Already, Minato thought, a good number of his academy classmates had died or else been devastatingly wounded during missions.

Yet, here he was in an almost atmospherically dark dungeon classroom, standing behind a large black table and pewter cauldron with Lee and her own cauldron next to him, watching as Malfoy looked across at them with that insufferably pretentious smirk. The boy looking for all the world he really expected Lee to just go trotting after him as soon as class was done, separating her from the riff-raff.

And Minato had this nagging suspicion that, come the end of the day, he and the rest of Konoha would very easily be considered riff-raff.

Maybe that was it, he thought to himself with a glance at Lee, that this was the place that, in some other world, Lee might have belonged. That in some other world, though he could hardly imagine what world that would be, she would take Malfoy's proffered hand without hesitation…

It was probably for the best that Snape Severus chose that moment to swoop in. Swoop was not an exaggeration; in his dark oversized robes he resembled a great bat moving towards the front of the room until he fluttered to a standstill. He stood there, surveying his students, several of the red and gold Gryffindors now shaking with alarm, among then Longbottom Neville. Dark eyes narrowed in on Lee, noting how she simply stared dully back, and his lips curled into an anticipatory smile as if he was preparing to make her regret ever having been born.

Minato suddenly had the sinking feeling that the Potions classroom was not long for this world.

"Class, as you may have noticed, we have some new students today," the man said, the word student emphasized as if it was almost a curse, "Miss Eleanor Lily Potter, our resident celebrity, after pulling a disappearing act for the last decade, has finally deigned to grace us with her presence all the way from the Village Hidden in the Leaves."

Lee looked towards Minato, eyebrows raising and a pleading look entering her eyes, silently asking what the hell was even going on and what she was supposed to do about it. Minato could only grimace and shrug ever so slightly, as this was… odd even for him. Sure, Lee had tap danced on many a chunin instructor's nerves in the academy, she'd run Jiraiya-sensei ragged for that matter, but they had usually been more frustrated and exasperated and at times irate. This was… the kind of menace you saw coming off Orochimaru-sama.

"Yes?" Lee finally said, more as a question than anything else, as Snape had paused long enough that she realized some answer really was required from her.

"Yes," he mocked, lips curling into a sneer, "Well, we shall see, Miss Potter, if your village's curriculum is up to English standards when it comes to the subtle art of potion making. Or, if Miss Potter is capable of reading. Where, Miss Potter, would I find bezoar?"

That was a rather obscure detail, an extremely obscure one that had been hidden in the appendix of a textbook that only Minato and maybe Uzumaki had bothered to read the night before. Lee, clearly, had kept up her habit of not bothering to read a single word.

"Um… Pass?" Lee asked, but the man seemed delighted by her ignorance.

"There is no passing in Potions, Miss Potter. For your cheek as well as your ignorance, ten points from Gryffindor, your host house."

Points, someone had said something about points at some point, but Minato honestly hadn't paid that much attention. Though, judging by the faces of the Gryffindors and Slytherins, he wished he had.

"Hey," Weasley shouted, fists pounding on the table, "That's not fair!"

"Another ten points, Mr. Weasley," the man said with relish, as if he lived for docking points from Gryffindor.

"Now, Miss Potter, what is the difference between Monkshood and Wolfsbane?" Another obscure detail from the appendix that Minato highly doubted anyone in this room besides him had bothered to read. Worse, one of those obscure details that he wasn't sure had any real use in any given potion detailed in the book.

Lee now looked slightly annoyed, eyebrows lowered and furrowed, green eyes dull as she stared forward and realized that Snape Severus might very well continue to do this the entire class period. "Also pass."

"And another ten points from Gryffindor! Pass again, Miss Potter, and I'll have no choice but to throw you in with the first-year students, where you clearly belong."

This gained almost unwilling snickers from the green and silver half of the room, especially from Malfoy, who couldn't help but cover his smile with a hand and pretend he was dignified and not laughing at Ellie Potter's public humiliation.

"What, Miss Potter, is the vital ingredient in Felix Felicis?"

Lee sighed, looked towards the arched ceiling, and gave the rather desperate and resigned answer of, "Is it the will of fire?"

"Wrong again Miss—" Lee didn't even let him finish

"If I admit I don't know can I leave?" Lee asked, crossing her arms in the Konoha chunin uniform that looked so out of place among their Hogwarts peers. "Look, I'm clearly not going to win this round of twenty questions, and if it makes you feel artificially superior to me, I will lose with grace and dignity."

"Fifty points from Gryffindor, Potter, for your absurd cheek and disrespect." The man's killing intent ratcheted upwards, to where if he had more chakra he might begin to resemble Orochimaru. As it was there was enough there, refined enough, that Minato felt himself grow wary.

"Great, more points," Lee said before looking over towards Minato and asking in English for everyone to hear, "Minato, what do these points do again, and why do I care if we lose them?"

"I…" Minato started, rubbing the back of his head and wondering how he could gracefully admit that he had no idea what these points were for.

"House points go towards the House Cup," Granger desperately explained with a fearful look in her eye, "At the end of the year the house with the most points is awarded a—"

Snape interjected, crowing and leaning down over his podium towards Lee with a venomous glare, "And a detention, Potter, since that seems to be the only language you understand!"

That, indeed, was a language Lee understood very well from her days in the academy. Uzumaki and Lee would often find themselves in detention for one reason or another back then. However, Minato thought, it'd never been for a reason as pointless and stupid as this.

More, Lee was… Lee was long since graduated from the academy. True, he supposed they were in an academy now, but she had earned her chunin vest and wasn't even a genin anymore. He and Lee were lined up to take their jonin exams in only a few months, they weren't… disciplined like naughty idiot children over speaking out of turn in a classroom.

Minato suddenly felt at once far too young and far too old, out of place, as if he'd been thrown into a world he just couldn't belong in anymore. A world that Lee, likely, couldn't belong in anymore either.

Lee's eyes darkened, her own killing intent rising to match Snape's. The room grew cold and ice began to form on the jars of odd pickled substances lining the walls.

"Name a potion," Lee finally said.

Minato turned towards her, whispered in her ear an imploring, "Lee—"

Lee didn't even glance at him, and Minato knew what she would have said if she had, that she would have looked at Minato with no room for argument and said simply, "I will destroy this man, Namikaze Minato."

The man sneered. "Name a—" But Lee cut him off before he could even finish the sentence.

"Name a potion, I will brew it, and if I fail you may throw me in with the eleven-year-olds so I can go and eat paste while you mock me for bullshit textbooks I haven't read, but if I succeed then you sit down, you shut up, and you pretend to be a competent instructor for the rest of the miserable time we're forced to be in each other's company."

There was a moment of tense, dead, silence as the man stared down at her, Eru Lee of Konohagakure, S-ranked chunin in all but name. "You think that you, a fourteen-year-old girl with no standardized education, who didn't even bother to bring her wand into the classroom, with no knowledge of the timing and ingredients necessary, can sit down and brew any potion?"

Lee's lips twisted into a rather humorless smile. "Are you afraid, sir?"

"You truly are worse than your father," Snape said with his own humorless smile, a statement that had Minato blinking and opening his mouth to ask who Lee's father was supposed to be, but Snape continued before Minato had chance, "Alright, Potter, since you so brazenly disregarded the necessary ingredients, while your classmates spend their time continuing to brew their wit-sharpening potions, and your foreign peers spend their time studying and wishing they'd thought to bring a wand to class, you will spend this class and this class alone brewing a successful Felix Felicis."

"But sir, that takes more than—" Granger started, aghast, but a withering glare from Snape had her silenced.

"Ten points from Gryffindor, Miss Granger, for speaking out of turn," Snape said chidingly, watching as Granger withered in her seat, throwing a helpless and sympathetic glance towards Lee.

However, Minato could only sigh and wonder if Lee hadn't had this same expression when Orochimaru once, years ago, had dared her to complete the edo-tensei and resurrect the first and second hokages in exchange for an unlimited supply of ramen.

One did not simply bargain with Eru Lee and expect to get away with it.

"Well, what are you waiting for? Work!" And with that, Minato sighed and passed his textbook over to Lee, waiting for the inevitable in relative quiet while Uzumaki cackled like a madwoman behind him and pretended to read her own Potions' book. God, he wished that he had gone with his gut instinct and insisted to the nidaime and shodaime to get them into London to buy wands. He had the strange thought that Dumbledore and even Snape assumed that they owned wands somewhere, but just hadn't brought them for whatever reason, and similarly Minato had assumed that they wouldn't use the ninjutsu sticks for everything.

However, it seemed that they did, which meant Minato was more or less left twiddling his thumbs with the rest of them while Lee prepared to outwit a man who seemed to take great joy in the suffering of children.

Lee silently opened the book, the will of fire she wrote off so often burning in her eye, and flipped first to the index and then to the rather minimal section on Felix Felicis.

He glanced over at the written description of the potion, its expensive and apparently volatile ingredients, and its exceedingly long incubation time of six months.

" _Lee._ " Minato rubbed the back of his head and tried to think of the most diplomatic and successful way to put this, " _I won't pretend to be an expert on_ English _tinctures after a day, but I think he may have given you an impossible task._ "

" _I am great at the impossible,_ " Lee noted, eyes skimming over the task with a determination that had always had Jiraiya-sensei breaking out into a cold sweat.

" _Yes, but remember what Jiraiya-sensei always said, it's not necessarily a good thing to advertise the impossible to foreigners._ " Except hadn't she already, in her defying of the reputedly unforgiveable curse of death when she was a year old? In her teleportation directly into Hogwarts? These people, strangely enough, already seemed to expect the impossible from Eleanor Lily Potter.

Lee paused, looking up at Minato and then across at Snape. There was a clear moment of hesitation where she weighed the benefits and the costs of showing even part of her hand to these people. It was an odd moment of maturity from her, Minato thought, a sign that she really was older and wiser than she had been at the age of twelve and that they were both slowly but surely headed into adulthood. Then Snape sneered at her, reading her hesitation as a prelude to her humiliation and failure, and something in Lee snapped.

" _It's worth it._ "

Minato winced and tried not to look as Lee placed her hands on either side of her cauldron. Still, he watched as her chakra moved through her hands and out into the pewter surface, enough to make the dull gray metal glow a bright almost blinding silver. Water, conjured from nothing, filled the bowl and then turned thick and golden. Small golden droplets began to leap out of the bowl, almost like small fish, only to land gracefully back inside without a single drop splashing over the edge.

And it looked, for all the world, just like the textbook described, and would undoubtedly have whatever effects the textbook described or what Lee believed to be liquid luck.

With a rather shark-like grin, Lee toted her cauldron over to Snape's podium, never spilling a drop, ignoring the slack-jawed looks she was receiving from every single English student in the classroom as well as Snape himself. She then slammed it down before Snape, threw up her hands as if all the words she could ever have spoken had now been said, and asked, "Well, professor, do you think I need to revisit your textbooks?"

Needless to say, with that sentence alone, Lee managed to earn herself two weeks' worth of detention.

* * *

He was lucky for once, that the Senju clan was both absurdly wealthy and absurdly sparse. With Tsunade as the only surviving descendent to their name, Tobirama had access to more funds than could have been imaginable even when he was clan head and hokage.

As it was, he thought, he was going through an absurd amount of gold within only a morning. Looking down at his sealing scroll, now filled to the brim with secondhand books upon secondhand books, high end English ingredients from chakra infused flora and fauna, steel forged by goblins, trunks expanded with seals to be larger on the inside, as well as the slim ash wand he'd purchased for an obscene price from Ollivanders, he considered it more than worth it, but…

That didn't mean it didn't hurt, and it didn't mean he wouldn't be applying to the hokage for a refund either, as some of these could go into Konoha's general stock or library instead of the Senju.

He sighed and rubbed at his temples again. This place was… It wasn't as bad as the castle, but it was still a migraine waiting to happen. He had no idea how these people stood it, or how, if there were any sensors here at all, they weren't rolling in the ground having epileptic fits.

Everything had chakra: the bricks in the street, the windows, the drinks, the candy, the clothing, every tiny little thing was buzzing with barely contained chakra that had it dancing, running, or simply changing colors and patterns at a dizzying rate.

Tobirama, though, seemed to be the only one having any sort of issue. The rest seemed blind or else utterly desensitized as they walked through the busy, angled streets, laughing and chatting with one another.

He had thought that traveling here would be the worst, through hellish instantaneous transportation by chakra-laden fire called the floo, somehow even more dizzying and disorienting than being teleported by Lee. Yet, somehow, just walking around in England long enough and feeling that dull ache in his head was worse.

As it was, Tobirama felt not only off balance but on edge. He wasn't sure, through this miasma of active chakra, that he could pinpoint anything subtle. Skyrocketing killing intent from someone truly lethal was hard to miss, even in this din, but anything smaller or more measured and, for the first time in his life, he honestly couldn't say that he could pick it out.

That, combined with the narrowed, angled, unfamiliar streets, the open windows and vantage points from rooftops, had him pacing through streets from the bank run by strange humanoid creatures, to the wand shop run by a cryptic gnarled old man who refused to answer any reasonable questions, to the book shops as quickly as possible.

Not helping his mood was when he finally did sit down to read and started flipping through first through books on recent history and any history at all on the Potter clan. Finally getting answers to the mysteries that Eru Lee had pointedly refused to examine too closely and the English shinobi had… Well, that was the issue, wasn't it?

Most of what the English nin had told them was true or, at least, true enough. Potter was one of the original, founding, clans of England, one of the sacred twenty-eight with Potter Eleanor as its last heir and de-facto head. Her father, Potter James, had been clan-head briefly before her, but had died very young at twenty-one, only a year after her birth. Her mother was a muggleborn witch, which Tobirama had mentally translated to being roughly equivalent to a child of civilians, and had also died at twenty-one.

The man had mentioned all of this, offhandedly remarking that Potter Eleanor's parents had been little more than schoolchildren, only just graduated from Hogwarts when they died. He had also mentioned the revolution, his revolution, which had destroyed them as well as almost half the country.

He had mentioned many of these details over the years, and yet…

And yet they had been so offhand at times, brushed over, allowing Tobirama to paint the world of England so that it matched his own. Clearly the man was a missing nin, but one from a land where the idea of being a missing nin was not inconceivable. He allowed Tobirama, Hashirama, all of them to paint their own wars and motivations over him to turn him into something familiar.

These people did not know what war, the clan wars or even the wars between hidden villages, tasted like. This man had brought them war after decades of nothing, decades of a tense discontent peace, but peace none the less. He had fought against untrained schoolchildren when the closest thing these people had to a trained military, to ninja, had fallen to his corruption of their governmental system. He had been so feared, so unprecedented, that ten years later they couldn't bring themselves to say his name.

And he had never mentioned that he had so very nearly had it all until one day, inexplicably, he had tried and failed to dispose of the infant Eleanor Lily Potter. He had let Tobirama believe that it was a deliberate, thought out plan to steal bloodlimits and longevity, rather than an act of…

No, he still didn't know; the books regarded it as a miracle, the dark lord's reasoning as depraved and nonsensical, but that did not mean he had done it for nothing. That the scar, in fact, had not been that clever attempt at a seal of storage and eventual corruption.

Still, something in him was unnerved at having left him behind, but far more unnerving was the thought that Tobirama still didn't know what to make of him. Even here, with evidence both supporting and disproving his claims, even after years with the man under house arrest, Tobirama still couldn't quite make up his mind.

And as for Potter Eleanor…

It was said that in the aftermath, with the imprisonment of her godfather and death of her parents, her future had been entrusted to Dumbledore Albus, who had taken her into hiding where she would remain until she was ready for Hogwarts. Until, that was, September 1991, when Potter Eleanor had not arrived at the gates of the school and had been declared missing.

In hiding…

Lee had spoken of civilian relatives, her mother's relatives most likely, the Dursleys. Given what he'd read, they were likely her only surviving blood relatives, a theory that had been supported by the English shinobi often enough, but he doubted she'd take him to them anytime soon. They'd barely even gotten her to come back to the country; it'd taken a contract of fuinjutsu and a hokage's order to do that.

He wondered, for a moment, if he should respect that. This place had him on edge, and more and more he found himself respecting Lee's opinions and decisions regarding her homeland. Perhaps it was best to return to Hogwarts, call it a day, hole himself in his room with tea and start making his way through these books.

However, there was also the village, which would at least demand Tobirama investigate and meet these people, if only to simply hunt down Eru Lee's blood limit to its source. And he had the feeling that waiting would not make the task any easier or any more pleasant.

He sighed, glancing at his rather haggard reflection in the glass of the shop window. He ignored the way a little girl shrieked at his appearance, pointing at his red eyes which were apparently even more of an oddity among these people than his own. One little boy, earlier in the morning, had even had the gall to ask him if he was a vampire.

He even, he thought rather ruefully, had the address given to him by Lee over years of many rants about English civilians. Number 4 Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey, United Kingdom, a gray civilian neighborhood filled with gray civilian genjutsus who were so corrupted at their source that they did not even bother to pretend to be anything other than a genjutsu.

So, why was he hesitating?

He stood and packed his materials with a grimace, ready to leave London's shinobi district behind for the afternoon and catch the muggle train to Surrey, where Little Whinging and Lee's civilian past waited for him.

* * *

A rather tall, thin man with incredibly greasy dark hair and a prominent nose approached Hashirama during lunch, glowering down at him in a way that was a bit reminiscent of the way Madara's little brother Izuna would sometimes glare at him.

Snape, if Hashirama was remembering right from the rather rushed morning introductions, the man's name was Snape Severus and he taught something called Potions. Hashirama was rather impressed with himself for remembering that, given that the man had seemed to want to sit as far away from him and Tobi that morning as possible.

He only knew his name because the deputy headmistress, McGonagall Minerva, had been polite enough to point him out.

Right now, the woman was giving Snape an almost annoyed and disapproving look while, on Hashirama's other side, the Charms instructor (and they really did have professors here for every discipline imaginable, there was even an expert in chakra infused plants that Hashirama was just dying to talk to) withered in his seat. Which was rather impressive, as the man was incredibly short to begin with.

Hashirama smiled, setting down his lunch to reach over with a free hand to shake as per English tradition. "Hello, Professor Snape, we haven't met but I'm—"

Snape, apparently, was in no mood to let Hashirama even introduce himself properly as, leaning forward, he hissed out, "Your idiot, undisciplined, arrogant student, Potter, has detention with you every night for the next two weeks."

Hashirama blinked, blinked again, remembered that Lee was Potter here. "Oh, right, Potter… I'm sorry, what?"

"Detention, Senju," the man said with the kind of contemptuous exasperation that Hashirama usually only got when Tobi was pushed past his limits. He was also looking at him with that expression that said, "Don't tell me you're too thick to understand that, Hashirama?"

"Honestly, Severus," McGonagall said with a sigh, "It's been one class."

"One class, Minerva, is more than enough for the likes of her," the man hissed, now turning his dark-eyed glare to her before glancing back at Hashirama, "I trust you, Professor Senju, to deal with it."

"Deal with it?" he asked rather dumbly before finally cluing in, "Oh, the detentions… Yes…"

Detention, he… What even was detention? He was pretty sure that was something Tobirama had just made up after Hashirama had died when he'd started making the academy. Lee had mentioned it off-hand now and then, as had Kushina, and from what he understood it was some… You gave someone who misbehaved in class some sort of boring task, so they didn't do it again?

Except wasn't Lee a little, well, old for that?

"Professor Senju?" McGonagall asked, now looking at him rather questioningly, as if she was wondering if he really had no idea what a detention was.

"Yes, I will certainly deal with it," he said with a confidence he didn't really feel and a grin to match, "I promise that she'll never do… whatever it was she did ever again."

For emphasis, he looked over at the student population, towards the Gryffindor table where Lee, Kushina, Minato, and Haru were all sitting eating their lunches while Lee was being fawned over by… too many people to count. He nodded to convey just how much detention he was going to give her.

Lee, for her own part, gave him a rather confused look before glancing over at Snape Severus. Then her expression transformed into an all too familiar one, that look that Tobi would always get on his face when some poor fool who thought he was terribly clever just walked into a room.

Hashirama looked almost unwillingly back over towards Snape, who was now bristling at the wordless challenge. Now, Hashirama could say something to perhaps warn him, or he could not.

With a grin, Hashirama instead asked, "So, is the English weather always this pleasant in the fall?"


	30. Eru Lee's Day Off

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated faster by commission from tumblr's wakanda-2k18 and beta'd by the lovely GlassGirlCeci on fanfiction

_In which the Konoha gang decides to play hooky with a rather dubious tour guide, Lee gets drunk on good fortune, and Tobirama finally has the exquisite pleasure of meeting Lee's civilian relatives._

 

* * *

 

"So, that was fun," Kushina summarized once the four of them had gathered in the hallway after lunch had ended and all of the English had shuffled off to the afternoon classes. Although, she kind of had had some fun in the last one. Sure, it became clear early on that they weren't going to teach them any of the chakra theory behind this tincture class, which meant without the English ninjutsu stick they were hosed, but then Lee had unleashed her wrath upon her latest victim and Kushina was satisfied.

 

Which, as usual, was kind of hilarious and had Kushina a bit envious that she couldn't cause the same reaction or catastrophe. Sure, Kushina could stick buckets of water above the door, but it just didn't have the same kind of effect as Lee going and Leeifying everything.

 

"Pointless, I think you mean," Minato said with a sigh, raking a hand through his coarse blonde hair before glancing down at the glass wine bottles filled with mysterious golden liquid, "Besides, now we have to figure out what to do with this."

 

This, of course, being Lee's self-brewed Felix Felicis, or as Kushina wanted to coin it, the golden sake of mystery. There'd been a whole row, and a whole new batch of detentions assigned to Lee by Professor Snape; he'd wanted to wipe her creation from the face of the map, while Lee was all for waste not want not since she'd gone through the trouble of making the damn stuff.

 

As a result, Lee now had detention for two weeks and had three wine bottles filled with whatever the hell liquid luck was.

 

"Drink it?" Lee asked, picking up a bottle and tilting it this way and that with narrowed eyes, as if just by staring at it she could figure out what to do with it.

 

Dead Last looked at the bottles warily, even more so than Minato, and said rather hesitantly, "Aren't we supposed to, I don't know, go to whatever the next class is?"

 

They were. By Kushina's watch they should have been there five minutes ago, but Minato appeared to be on her wavelength as he said with half a thought (still distracted by their bottles of mystery), "There's no point without wands. In fact, we should probably use this time to just go ahead and go to _London_ and get these damned wands already."

 

"And figure out what we're going to do with Lee's golden mystery sake, believe it," Kushina added, which, judging by Namikaze's pretty frown, was what he probably considered an even bigger problem than getting from wherever Hogwarts was to London.

 

"Well, we probably give it a test run and then give it to R and D, right?" Lee asked, turning the bottle this way and that, watching as the liquid bubbled and jumped inside the green glass.

 

"Well," Minato started, hesitating as he looked at the contents, "According to the text it's supposed to be toxic in high doses, not to mention highly addictive. More, no offense Lee, that's not even getting into what your brand will do."

 

"My brand?" Lee asked, blinking owlishly and entirely caught off guard.

 

"You have a tendency, Lee, to interpret things in interesting ways." Minato held up a hand before she could interrupt. "Remember how the first and second hokage are immortal because you never gave them an expiration date? Or how your clones are… your clones? I just… Well, Lee, when you hear liquid luck, what do you think?"

 

Lee looked back down at the bottle, frowning, "Huh, I… When you put it like that, Minato—"

 

"When Namikaze puts it like that he's being a pansy," Kushina interjected, glaring sideways at Namikaze Minato being dubious and boring as usual, "Honestly, Lee, it will be fine, believe it!"

 

"Well, I am indestructible," Lee said musingly as she moved the bottle this way and that, "So if I overdose then no harm no foul."

 

"Wait, you're what now?" Dead Last asked, only now reminding Kushina that he'd somehow missed out on the party that had been Lee poisoning herself and then coming back to life in front of at least twelve witnesses.

 

Actually, how had he missed that? Kushina was pretty sure everyone who was anyone had been there for that.

 

"I do not agree with that," Minato said with a pout, but the kind that said he knew he had already lost and had decided that sulking in disapproval was his best course of action. Which, it probably was, but for once he could stand to be anything but a killjoy.

 

God, Kushina wished he was half as pretty as he was; someone so boring didn't deserve to be so beautiful.

 

"Well, I guess there's no time like the present," Lee muttered as she uncorked the bottle in her hands, "Especially if we're playing hooky."

 

She threw her head and the bottle back, took a rather large swallow before corking it again, and closed her eyes shut while the rest of them leaned in. She… didn't look any different; in fact, she was just kind of standing there, eyes squeezed closed, clearly waiting for some sort of reaction along with the rest of them.

 

There was no golden glow, no fireworks, no thrum of chakra even.

 

"Well?" Kushina finally asked in the dead and anticipatory silence.

 

"It tastes… kind of like butterscotch?" Lee said, blinking. She then looked down at her hands, as if they might tell her the answer, and then back up at them, "I… don't feel particularly lucky."

 

"And you're not dead," Minato added, head now tilting to the side as he surveyed her.

 

"And I'm not dead," Lee repeated slowly. She sent the bottle along with the other two into that spaceless void where Lee probably stored everything, and then stood there, hands on her hips, and said slowly, "This feels very anticlimactic."

 

"I think I like anticlimactic," Minato responded with crossed arms and his head still tilted at an angle as if just waiting for her to explode or start foaming at the mouth.

 

"I'm not sure I do," Lee said, "I just feel like I'm waiting for the other shoe somewhere, somehow, to drop."

 

They all were, actually, just kind of standing around dumbly looking at Lee then at each other, waiting for something to happen or someone to say something. Which, as usual, meant it was up to Kushina to blurt, "So, I guess we're heading to _London_ then? You know, so we can actually do shit in our next class, believe it!"

 

It seemed to be what they needed, as Minato sighed, shook his head fondly, and then started walking down the hallway with Lee and everyone else following behind. "I suppose that means we should get the shodaime and get off the grounds, since apparently Lee teleporting straight into _Hogwarts_ is considered…"

 

"Bad form?" Kushina asked, but Minato just smiled.

 

"Well, I was going to say impossible, but I suppose it's bad form as well," Minato said, before adding, "I know I would get nervous if foreigners started teleporting themselves into Konoha's academy without warning."

 

Lee, however, was still looking at her hands with a frown, paying no mind to the conversation.

 

"How do you know if you feel particularly lucky? Or even unlucky, for that matter, because whatever this thing was, I have the aftertaste in my mouth alright, but I'm really not feeling all that—"

 

They all stopped and looked up, as rounding a corner and making their way towards the moving staircases they spotted another student apparently sitting this class period out.

 

It was an English girl, Gryffindor by the color of her tie, with red hair, and if Kushina was remembering right then this was Weasley Ron's little sister, thirteen-year-old Weasley Ginny. She looked ordinary enough, wearing the usual English uniform, second-hand shoes, pale with dark brown eyes and freckles dotting her nose, wand in hand, and chakra levels about the same level you'd expect from a genin.

 

More, just like every Englishman in the whole damn place, at the sight of Lee her eyes were practically bugging out of her skull and a flush was spreading rapidly across her face.

 

"Oh Christ," Lee said in exasperation, pinching the bridge of her nose, "Minato, I think I don't feel lucky."

 

The girl coughed and looked away, then, and oddly enough seemed to get a hold of herself. Kushina said oddly because it'd been a day, and no one had managed to get a hold of themselves yet. The closest was Snape Severus, who had gone so far in the other direction, choosing to loathe Lee rather than become her academy fangirl, that he became just as ridiculous.

 

Still, Kushina guessed it was kind of refreshing, even if it was… a little weird compared to all the others.

 

 _"Sorry, I just—_ " She paused, stopped, smiled and held out a hand. " _I'm Ginny Weasley. We met yesterday, sort of; you mostly met my brother Ron._ "

 

And the hand, it wasn't given to Lee explicitly, but instead to Minato. Which, either the girl was very clever or extremely polite, Kushina thought with raised eyebrows. Because the quickest way into Lee's good graces was buttering up Namikaze Minato. The trouble was, she thought as Minato took the hand, Namikaze Minato was not easy to butter up.

 

" _Minato Namikaze,_ " Minato said, before motioning to the rest of them in turn, " _Over there is Kushina Uzumaki, Haru Matsuda, and of course Lee Eru, who you've already met._ "

 

A small oh of surprise, a glance towards Lee, and then something… sharper appearing in her eyes for a moment. Something that looked like it didn't belong in a civilian English girl, but Kushina couldn't place where it should belong either. " _So, not Ellie Potter after all, then?_ "

 

" _Not since I was four,_ " Lee blandly responded, and the girl just nodded, taking this in stride in a way that no one in this whole damn school had so far.

 

" _Well, I'm having a bit of a health day, as you probably noticed,_ " Ginny said, rubbing the back of her head sheepishly, " _After my first year they don't give me too much trouble about taking those every now and then. You know, when it gets to be too much…_ "

 

She trailed off, but it… It was awkward, but it also wasn't awkward; Kushina couldn't quite put her finger on it, but something about it seemed very deliberate. Like, kind of like it was an act, but that it was such a good one she almost couldn't see it for what it was. Except, of course, that it wasn't quite that good.

 

" _Health day?_ " Minato asked, blinking as his eyes swept over the girl who, now that she had mentioned it, did have a kind of sickly cast to her.

 

Not, Kushina thought, that it seemed to extend to her chakra which now that she thought about it seemed abnormally strong for this place. In fact, if Kushina was really paying attention, the girl's chakra seemed almost dampened, like there was a lot more where that came from but she was keeping it under some intense wraps.

 

" _Oh, I guess… I guess they haven't told you about that,_ " the girl said, looking over at them with large brown eyes, when Kushina couldn't help the growing suspicion that Weasley Ginny had known damn well that no one was going to tell them about 'that'.

 

" _About what?_ " Minato asked, apparently either not getting the same sparks of intuition Kushina was getting (because he was a stupid man who had a thing for red hair) or else ignoring it in favor of getting clearly laid out gossip.

 

The girl paled, then flushed, then looked away as if she'd just been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. " _I… I probably shouldn't be the one telling you, but I guess if no one else is going to… But, why are you skipping class?_ "

 

" _Health day,_ " Lee interjected before anyone else could respond, " _I'm feeling… lucky._ "

 

That seemed to bring the girl to a halt. Suddenly that cheerful, flustered, and innocent disposition seemed to crack and a hint of something dry, sardonic, and very familiar slipped through. " _Lucky?_ "

 

" _Yes,_ " Lee responded, crossing her arms and looking particularly deep in thought, " _And I don't like it, especially when all it appears to be doing so far is producing inane conversations with schoolgirls._ "

 

The façade of Weasley Ginny, English schoolgirl taking a health day, chipped a little further. _"… Inane conversations with schoolgirls. I'm sorry, Lee, that you find me… inane._ "

 

Lee seemed to realize this was somewhat awkward, or was prompted to feel bad by Minato elbowing her in the ribs, and said rather lamely, " _It's not your fault._ "

 

Ginny hardly looked mollified by that; the flush returned to her cheeks, but this time with an angrier shade. She stared for a moment, eyes flashing and looking as if she was torn between holding her tongue and recommencing the show or else letting Lee have it.

 

Apparently, her lack of patience won out, as she said through gritted teeth, " _You know, I've been reading books about Ellie Potter all my life. I've… looked up to her all my life. I didn't realize she'd be this much of an ass._ "

 

Minato cringed. Dead Last just looked lost as he glanced between the girl and the rest of them, as if facial expressions alone could give him the context, and Lee just spared the girl a pair of unimpressed eyebrows as if she was still waiting for Weasley Ginny's challenge.

 

It was Minato, of course, who broke first as he approached the girl with a now strained grin. " _Sorry about Lee, she's… not good with strangers. That, and we're on a bit of a time crunch—_ "

 

" _Time crunch?_ " Ginny asked, Lee's slight apparently forgotten as her eyes widened once again and she looked at them all curiously, " _Where are you going? You're already late for class._ "

 

" _That's not—_ " Kushina started, but Minato cut her off, apparently feeling the need to be polite and give out what he thought was harmless information.

 

" _London, actually,_ " Minato said, with his entirely too charming Minato grin that had had all the girls in the academy pining after him in secret, too terrified to approach him with Lee as his faithful shadow, " _You see, we may have neglected to pick up our wands before Potions class started._ "

 

The girl, however, didn't seem all that interested in Minato. Which… Kushina wasn't sure if she was going to label that as weird or not. Kushina took it as a point of pride that she had never actively, or publicly, drooled over Namikaze Minato, but she'd admit that he was very pretty. More, that when he poured on the golden prince charm, it was very hard to look away.

 

Weasley Ginny though, Kushina thought with some alarm, didn't seem to care at all. Which, Kushina supposed Namikaze might just not be her brand of man, or she wasn't into any brand of man period, but still…

 

" _Really?_ " the girl said, apparently fascinated, as she looked past them all and fell into her own thoughts, " _So in_ Konoha _, then, they really do perform all magic without wands. I hadn't realized that was possible, not to any true extent…_ "

 

Her eyes brightened and she said with a grin, " _I can get you out of the castle_."

 

" _Somehow,_ " Lee said rather drily, " _I don't think that's going to be a problem._ "

 

" _Well, not if you don't care about getting even more detention,_ " Ginny said with a sly grin, " _I can skip class every now and then. You, however, won't get away with it. Especially since Lee here has already been missing for years; they won't want you out of their sight for a second. If you try to walk out the front gates you're going to have Headmaster Dumbledore himself barring the way._ "

 

Judging by Lee's expression, she still didn't think that was that much of a problem. Which, it probably wasn't, but even Kushina thought it sounded like a pain to sneak past the only jonin caliber wizard in this whole damn place. Sure, she'd run the Uchiha police force ragged when she was in the academy, but if you could avoid them then you generally should.

 

Lee let out a sigh and then said, with a very reluctant expression on her face as she stared across at their potential guide, " _I think that luck thing might be kicking in… That or the force is suddenly nagging me to take Tequila Weasel's advice._ "

 

“ _…It's Ginny Weasley,_ " Ginny said after a rather pained moment.

 

But Minato was looking back at Lee, no longer having any concern for Weasel Tequila. "Are you sure, Lee?"

 

"One does not simply argue with the universe, Minato," Lee said with a grimace, as if she didn't really like it either but felt she had little to no choice in the matter, "We can… I don't know, leave the shodaime a note and be back by dinner."

 

"Wait, we're doing what now?" Dead Last asked, dark eyes moving from Ginny back to the gang.

 

"Weasley Ginny here has kindly decided to help us get out of the castle and play tour guide in _London_ ," Kushina explained, not really sure how she felt about all of that except that she was willing to trust Lee more than she distrusted Ginny, "And it really is sad you missed all of that, Dead Last."

 

"I didn't miss all of it!" he said, glaring over at Lee, "I heard the part where Lee did her usual Lee routine!"

 

Lee apparently took offense, as she shouted right back at Dead Last for all he was worth, "Hey, you try drinking mysterious universe juice and then running into what looks like an NPC from a dating simulation! If the universe's idea of me being lucky is me getting lucky then I'm not sure I want it."

 

Here Minato flushed and spluttered, apparently realizing only for the first time that that was a distinct possibility from this encounter. Kushina could see the little switch in his brain flipping from 'cute little red-head school girl' to 'red-head rival must destroy'.

 

"Namikaze," Kushina said as she looked down on him in supreme judgement, "This is sad even for you, believe it."

 

"I don't know what you're talking about, Uzumaki!" Minato spat back at her, "There's nothing wrong with being polite."

 

"Sure, there isn't." Kushina then sighed, shook her head in pity, and said, "To be honest, I'm not even sure you deserve Lee, you stupid flaky blond."

 

Still, she thought, as much as it pained her to admit it, she'd rather see Lee and Minto doing their thing than Lee and… Weasel Tequila, as Lee had so aptly dubbed their latest and greatest party companion. There was just something about this girl that really tap danced on Kushina's nerves. More, something familiar that she just couldn't place.

 

Which was too bad, because now it was going to be nagging at her all day.

 

Minato just sighed, apparently immune to Kushina's jabs, or at least at his daily limit as he asked, "Must you, Uzumaki?"

 

"Believe it," Kushina responded without the slightest bit of hesitation, as well as her own wild grin that just had him raising a single eyebrow.

 

A slight cough, then they all looked over at Weasley Ginny (flushing again, but also looking somewhat annoyed for being ignored so long), " _Well, are you coming?_ "

 

They all glanced each other, glanced at Lee, their unofficial yet somehow unquestioned leader. " _Sure, why not?_ "

 

Lee then produced a note out of thin air (much to Ginny's wide-eyed alarm and fascination) and with a swish of her fingers sent it racing through time and space to wherever the shodaime happened to be loitering, and then they were following their guide down the halls and out into the great city of London and whatever exciting adventures awaited them there.

 

* * *

 

In some ways it was a relief, he thought, because there truly was no chakra in this place. Threads, he supposed, if he concentrated hard enough that trailed all the way back to London, but little more than that. Houses remained inanimate, colors remained steady, and doorways unsealed.

 

However, in other ways, after the clamor and noise of Diagon Alley, there was something almost alarming about the silence. It heightened his senses in a way, caused him to reach out further and faster than he would have, searching for eyes and ears where they weren't supposed to be and finding none there.

 

Just a quiet civilian street in a quiet civilian village.

 

Except, he thought, it did not have the look of a civilian village in the land of fire.

 

All the houses were the same, only tiny minute differences setting one apart from the other. The grass, even, appeared to be the same exact height and was separated from a neighbor's lawn by even picket fences.

 

Number 4, Privet Drive, Little Whinging looked exactly the same as Number 5 and Number 6. If Tobirama was going to go out on a limb, then he suspected it looked exactly the same as Numbers 7, 8, 9, 10, and so on.

 

You would never guess from looking at its white-washed exterior that a power such as Eru Lee's had once lived here. Or at least, if you weren't a sensor and fuinjutsu master, you would never guess.

 

Though the outside looked the same, and he suspected the inside did as well, curled about the house were the remnants of truly powerful seals. Broken now, stagnant for years by the feel of them, but they'd once had been the kind that had warded Uzushio's walls, if not stronger than that. Still they curled, heavy, cloying, and red about every surface of the place, lying in wait to thrum into life once again.

 

Though whether it had been solely to keep enemies out, he thought, or keep Eleanor Lily Potter in…

 

He frowned, sighed, and once again decided that it was now or never. Especially, he thought, as he was already beginning to attract attention from the civilians. Hashirama, he thought bitterly, had never had this sort of issue, but then Tobirama had had to go and inherit all the recessive Uzumaki genes.

 

The white hair and red eyes that hadn't been seen in the Uzumaki bloodline in centuries.

 

He stepped onto the driveway, that smooth gray concrete that a small village like this could never have afforded in the land of fire, and then up to the doorstep. There, with a frown after searching for a moment, he found the doorbell and pressed it, listening to the chiming that notified the civilians inside.

 

 

He waited for a moment, then another, heard someone step to the doorway and peer through the small eye-hole in the wood of the door. He waited longer, then, as there was a spike of panic and fury and then footsteps, as whatever civilian had been there… left.

 

Tobirama stared at the door in consternation, then, with a furrowed brow pressed the doorbell again.

 

There was no hint of footsteps, no sound of anyone approaching, but that spike of panic grew into terror.

 

Tobirama supposed that as a shinobi he had not often made it a habit of going door to door with civilians, not outside of Konoha, at least, where his reputation had preceded him. More, there were many civilians who would certainly fear a shinobi's presence and would have slammed the door in his face on principle. Especially, he thought, during the clan wars.

 

However, somehow, he still felt at something of a loss and utterly uncertain what to do. He couldn't just leave after having come all the way out here. On the other hand, he thought as he stared at the door, he wasn't sure he wanted to go breaking down their door either.

 

He certainly could do it, but it'd give a very unfavorable impression. Except it seemed they had a rather unfavorable impression already.

 

It was standing there on the doorstep, trying to come to a decision, that the door flew back open and he was faced with an enraged, panicked, civilian woman wielding a frying pan to bring it down on his head as she screamed, "How dare you show your face here, freak!"

 

Tobirama ducked, quickly tore the pan out of her grasp (leaving her gasping in terror), and then stepped inside shutting the door behind him before anyone could think to call the police (whether they would call the civilian police or more formidable English wizards was beyond him).

 

She shuddered, shook, and tore her hand out of his grasp, allowing him to get a good look at her. There was… some family resemblance there, he finally decided. It was much like the family resemblance between him and Hashirama, so very slight, but there if you looked at the right angle. This woman was frightfully tall and thin, with straw-like flat blonde hair piled on her head, but he thought he could see Lee's nose there and maybe a hint of the shape of her eyes.

 

The woman bit her lip, watery blue eyes flaring as she said, "If you're looking for the girl she's not here, disappeared years ago, flat out vanished from the house."

 

She seemed panicked as she said this, as if she very well knew that Tobirama might blame her for the girl's disappearance but insisted on the words all the same.

 

More, he realized with a slight widening of his eyes, she assumed he was an English wizard.

 

Slowly, glancing down at the pan in his hand (not entirely sure what to do with it now), he said, "I know."

 

"You know?" the woman asked, jaw falling open, but just as quickly it shut and she glared across at him with all the haughtiness she could manage, "Then what do you want? The old man already came to see us years ago, we don't know anything new."

 

"I'm not English," Tobirama confessed, earning an incredulous look from her, and then something more fearful, because if he wasn't English then what in the hell was he?

 

He motioned to the rest of the house. "May I step in?" he asked. Her mouth curled, and she looked tempted for a moment, but eventually forcefully said, "No, whatever you say you say it here, and then you get out before my husband gets home."

 

That did not sound like a suggestion, which he couldn't help but smile at. He'd give the woman this, as unpleasant as her voice was, she certainly had gumption, ordering around a shinobi who was already inside her house and had so painlessly disarmed her.

 

If Tobirama were so inclined he could stay long after her husband and son arrived.

 

His eyes roamed the walls behind her, lingering on the photographs, and he felt his smile dim as he noticed an oddity. There were no pictures of Lee, no hint of her existence. In fact… Though he could see little of this house, hadn't seen the bedrooms, he suddenly had the oddest thought that Lee's existence had been painstakingly erased from this place.

 

As if Eleanor Lily Potter had been a bad dream they had collectively had.

 

Then his eyes fell on a door beneath the stairs, a cupboard. Suddenly memories of Lee's many offhand comments of living in a cupboard beneath a set of stairs sounded in his head. Almost without realizing it, he was moving towards it despite the woman's shrieking protests, and his hand was on the golden handle, twisting it open to reveal nothing more than a cupboard stuffed with boxes.

 

Yet, even so, he kept the door open and stared into the shadows. In his mind's eye he could strip the cupboard of its boxes, make it dark and dank and cramped, perhaps lay out a futon or mattress on the floor and stick a terribly small red-headed girl inside…

 

The woman forced the door shut, slamming it closed, "You have no business looking at our things!"

 

He spared her a glance, watching again as she shuddered beneath it, appearing at least slightly aware of just what someone like him could do to someone like her. Still, he did not point that out, but instead asked, "Your niece, did she live inside this cupboard?"

 

The woman didn't answer, but instead paled in horror, and Tobirama read that as answer enough. His words had struck a terrible, fearful, chord in the woman, as if he had found out the secret she had always known someone would find out someday.

 

And the woman knew that he knew it. "She wasn't ours!" She stepped closer to him, the fear not gone but dampened by the need to justify. "She was my sister's, my fool of a sister, and we never wanted her, but they made us take her!"

 

"They made you take her?" Tobirama parroted, but the woman was not to be stopped.

 

She hissed, eyes glancing towards the door in contempt and all the bitter memories it held. "They put her on our doorstep with a letter, a baby in a blanket with the morning milk, and we couldn't… We couldn't just leave her there, but we couldn't forget what she was either!"

 

"What she was?" Tobirama asked, feeling something colder dripping through him as a hint of Lee's past began to come together.

 

The woman sneered. "She was like them, like you, and the older she got the worse she became. Much worse than my sister, even."

 

Much worse. Far more gifted, the woman meant. Eru Lee, at the age of four, had managed teleportation to a place she had never been. A feat that Tobirama had never been capable of, even at his height, managing only a bastardized method with seals to guide his travel. He didn't doubt that at a very young age, a worryingly young age, Eru Lee had been capable of miracles in ninjutsu.

 

Clans would have killed for that blood in their family. Had she been born during Tobirama's childhood, had she stumbled unaware into the Senju compound, they would have killed for her blood limits and abilities.

 

Perhaps, Tobirama thought, his father would have insisted that instead of leaving Tobirama unwed, that he marry the foreign girl while Hashirama sealed ties with the Uzumaki through the marriage of Mito.

 

And it was so strange to think that this woman would look at these same gifts, this same potential, and see it as something akin to leprosy as opposed to something nations would gleefully wage war for.

 

In fact, he thought dully, these fools were lucky to have survived her staying in their house. That they were not harvested for their genes, for their future progeny, for the slightest hope that Eru Lee might be recreated…

 

Had they been in the Elemental Nations, he thought, it would have been nothing short of a miracle.

 

"We never wanted her," the woman continued, blithely and utterly ignorant of her own good fortune, "We never asked for her, and we still raised her, fed her, took care of her better than her own dead parents were able to and—"

 

And finally, Tobirama interjected, "There's no need to justify yourself to me, woman. What's done is done."

 

She paled at that and fell silent, looking as if she desperately wanted to ask what he meant by that. Whether that meant she had passed his test or else failed it, if he would leave and never return or else linger. She toyed with her necklace of fake pearls anxiously as her eyes darted to the door and back again.

 

He took that moment to survey her again, focusing on the chakra. There was so pitifully little of it. True, civilians were born into clans, true, Lee's mother had been born of a family of civilians and was the first shinobi of her generation, but all the same, there was only a pale sliver of chakra there. It was… For Lee to have as much chakra as she did, even if her father had had as much as an Uzumaki, he would have expected both families to be extraordinary. He would have expected this woman to show some hint of similarity to Lee.

 

Just as Tobirama and Hashirama shared some traits in their elements and abilities, even if Tobirama had not inherited the mokuton. You could tell, at the end of the day, that both of them were Senju and both had a healthy dose of Uzumaki in their bloodlines (even if Tobirama's was a bit more apparent).

 

Yet there was nothing, in fact, other than the few facial features. Going by chakra alone, Tobirama would have guessed they weren't related at all. That Lee, mysterious abilities and all, had simply sprung forth from… from nothingness.

 

Except blood limits did not work like that.

 

"Well, did you want something or did you just come to stare?" the woman asked, as if she had any control over him whatsoever.

 

"Your blood," he finally said, and she paled and stepped back from him.

 

"Your blood," he said as he stepped forwards towards her, hands moving into a handseal to trap her feet in ice formed from the water in the air, "And your son's blood."

 

The uncle was related by marriage, but the other two—it wasn't much, but it was all he had to work with. All he had to either ease his concern or else point to Lee's origins being even stranger that he'd dared to believe.

 

The woman shrieked, screamed in terror, but he was already placing soundproof seals about the house and moving towards her to knock her into unconsciousness. Then, as she fell onto the floor, feet now falling out of the melting ice, he retrieved a stored syringe and vial. He located her vein and carefully extracted the blood, labelling it in English writing "Evans, Petunia".

 

He looked down at her, looking so much smaller and softer when unconscious, and then looked back across towards the cupboard he was now all but certain Lee had once occupied…

 

There was some tragedy, he thought, in here somewhere. However, he couldn't help but think it was not Konoha's. The fear of blood limits, of shinobi, had driven her straight into their arms, and Tobirama even after everything could not help but be grateful for that.

 

For that he should be thanking these poor fools, and yet, he left the woman pale and still on the floor while he waited for the son to arrive.

 

* * *

 

Lee wasn't sure she liked being lucky, even if, so far, it seemed to be having practical results.

 

Weasley Ginny, true to her rather creepy word, had shown them a backway out of the castle and into the neighboring village of Hogsmeade. From there, Lee easily teleported them into London, where Ginny again took them from the steps of Westminster cathedral all the way to a pub called The Leaky cauldron, which served as the entrance to the English hidden village in London.

 

A place Ginny had gleefully called Diagon Alley, and then just as cheerfully had led them to Ollivanders, the one and only wandmaker of repute in all of Great Britain with only Gregoravitch as a rival in Europe at large.

 

So, sitting in Ollivanders and watching as the man fitted Minato for a wand with Lee next and last in line, she wasn't going to say she wasn't getting results. And it was nice to get results, but all the same, something was…

 

She didn't know. She didn't like this nagging feeling in her brain that told her the wands weren't enough. That the wands weren't even close to enough, that the textbooks weren't either, and neither was Gringotts (although these had all been labeled by Lee's new luck sense as good things to do). No, Lee's new internal luck sensor was telling her that the point of all of this, this whole thing, was to sit here next to Weasley Ginny.

 

That something about Weasley Ginny was really, really important, and that it would be in Lee's best interest to get on her good side. Not necessarily because good things would happen if she appealed to Weasley Ginny, although there was a hint that this could happen, but more because really bad and inconvenient things would happen if she didn't.

 

And that Ginny running into them hadn't just been good fortune, but had instead been an evaluating period, one Lee was currently barely passing, if only because Lee had been labeled 'unexpected' and 'alarmingly powerful' if not interesting.

 

And the burning liquid luck churning in her gut told her that it was necessary that Lee was labeled 'interesting' if not 'fascinating' by the end of Eru Lee's Day Off.

 

More, that informing Minato, or even Uzumaki, about any of this was A Very Bad Idea. She had no idea why, as keeping Minato informed was usually the best course of action, but all the same, that one wasn't just a nagging suspicion but instead alarm bells ringing in her head that telling either of them would end in instant failure.

 

So, here Lee was, sitting next to her tall glass of gin, knowing that she'd better say something at some point or else things would explode. Probably.

 

Luckily, even thinking that she needed to say something, Lee suddenly knew exactly what she needed to say. "What happened your first year?"

 

(God, Lee hated this luck potion so much.)

 

Ginny glanced at her, eyebrows raising, looking for a moment a little amused and perhaps unimpressed, but then the look was gone, and Ginny was Ginny once again as she looked down at the floor. "I really don't like to talk about it."

 

"Yes, you do," Lee said, the taste of butterscotch and honesty on the tip of her tongue, "It's your hook, you want me to ask you about your first year. So, tell me."

 

Ginny looked up, a rather odd blank look on her face as she looked at Lee, taking her in for all she was worth. Finally, an odd smile on her face, self-derisive and amused in the same moment, she said, "I suppose I do."

 

Ginny folded her hands together and looked for a moment at Minato (now on his third wand of the afternoon, swishing it this way and that under Ollivander's shrewd eye), "You know I'm the youngest, don't you? The youngest of seven siblings—six older brothers, four of them were in Hogwarts at the time. I… was possessed, we think, by a very dark artifact left behind by the dark lord, a diary. None of them noticed. For months I was blacking out, waking up covered in rooster's blood with no idea what was happening, and not one of them noticed. Percy was the closest, and he thought I had the flu."

 

Ginny breathed out, letting whatever bitterness she held for her incompetent brothers go, and then continued, "While I was possessed he had me open the chamber of secrets beneath the castle, release a basilisk and have it petrify and try to kill muggleborns. Enemies of the heir, as he called them. Hermione, Ron, and Neville spent the whole year trying to track the heir—track me—down. They almost did. I tried to get rid of the diary at one point and Neville found it, but… But it found me again. I… I ended up waking up down there in the chamber at some point in May, and I don't know what happened, but the diary was ruined, stabbed through with a basilisk's fang. Then I somehow got out and I had to… Well, I told everyone, and they didn't hold it against me. But I just wish…"

 

Ginny stopped, glanced over at Lee with an odd hopeful look in her eyes, "I kept thinking if Ellie Potter was here, if Lee was here, then she could have saved me. Even if Neville, if Ron and Hermione, couldn't save me, then you would have been able to."

 

Lee, perhaps, under normal circumstances would have taken this for what it was (after all, what did Lee know of the English), or perhaps she would have played along, but with luck guiding her tongue she ended up saying, "Do you know if they know you gave them a fake?"

 

Ginny stopped, her face going blank, and she asked, "What?"

 

Uzumaki, Minato, and Dead Last weren't looking anywhere near them, Lee having deflected their attention away before the conversation could start, and their attention consumed too much by Minato's trials and tribulations finding the right wand to even notice.

 

They'd probably think they couldn't get wands at all, if Dead Last hadn't managed to get one in about five minutes and Uzumaki in even less.

 

"You gave them a fake, or you gave them the real one, but it no longer mattered," Lee repeated, eyes never moving from Ginny's face, "Ginny Weasley hasn't been at the wheel for two years. Ginny Weasley probably doesn't even exist anymore. Do they know?"

 

Ginny's hands fingered her wand, but Lee silently and motionlessly tore it from her grasp before she could think to stun or even kill Lee. Ginny's eyes moved to the wood, now rolling on the floor, then back to Lee. Calmly, she folded her hands once again, whatever veneer there was left of Weasley Ginny dripping from her entirely and leaving something colder and so much older in her place. "Clever girl. What do you want?"

 

"Nothing," Lee said, and once again the girl, or whatever wore the face of Weasley Ginny, seemed at a complete loss.

 

"Nothing?" the girl asked.

 

"Good fortune," Lee amended, "Perhaps."

 

"Well," Ginny's puppetmaster, Tequila, said drily, "Wouldn't we all."

 

They sat in a rather awkward and uncomfortable silence, both of them staring forward, however Lee knew this wasn't her turn to talk. This was where things could go downhill very quickly—no, now was the moment to wait and set the bait and see what the thing wearing Ginny's face would do.

 

"Really, nothing?" she finally asked, turning back to Lee, now looking utterly incredulous.

 

"Nothing," Lee repeated quite easily.

 

"Doesn't it even concern you, slightly? After all, if you're right, then I'm Ginny Weasley's murderer inside her skin. More, then by my own confession I unleashed a basilisk on the unwitting student population and am the dark lord incarnate—"

 

"I don't care," Lee cut him off, which seemed to confuse him further.

 

Which… If it was the dark lord… Lee had assumed the dark lord was back in Konoha, or else a significant chunk of his chakra. So, either one of them was lying or else the man had left his chakra all over the goddamn place. Which…

 

Lee's luck potion was telling her that now was not the time to go bringing that up.

 

Ginny gave her a look, the kind of look that the nidaime gave her when he thought she was being particularly slow. "Oh, come now, Lee, you must realize that I would hold your defeat of me against you. If you are correct then we are natural enemies, you and I."

 

"First, I am correct," Lee insisted, as apparently fortune truly did favor the bold, and then added, "And second, I don't see how those two are correlated."

 

"Oh?" Ginny asked, crossing her arms and looking entirely unamused, "Enlighten me, Lee of _Konoha_."

 

"It is neither my fault nor my problem that you went throwing green lasers at babies—"

 

Ginny cut her off, utterly aghast and mortified (as she well should be), "I did not go throwing—"

 

"Further, that's background information, it has nothing to do with the roads we choose to take from here on out," Lee said, cutting Ginny off in turn, "I have no interest in England, you have no interest in _Konoha_. I think if we leave each other well enough alone we'll get along perfectly fine."

 

Ginny just stared for a moment, apparently utterly stumped, before finally asking, "Really?"

 

"Really."

 

"Even if I, I don't know, decide to eat all their children?" Ginny pressed.

 

"Gross," Lee acknowledged, but then added, "But not my problem."

 

Ginny held out her hands, opened her mouth, then stopped. She paused, stared at her fingers, then started again, "So, what you're saying is, that if I leave you, Minato Namikaze, Kushina Uzumaki, Haru Matsuda, and all your _Konoha_ friends to your own devices, then I can do whatever the bloody hell I want with England."

 

Lee thought about it for a moment, pursed her lips, then nodded, "Yes, that sounds about right."

 

Ginny, however, looked as if that wasn't the answer she (he) was expecting at all. Finally, after a moment of stunned silence, he finally admitted, "You know, you are… not what I expected of Eleanor Lily Potter."

 

"Sorry to disappoint," Lee said, and that prompted a smile out of the girl, slight at first and then fuller and more genuine.

 

"No, don't be. I think… I think I like it." Ginny then held out a hand to Lee. "Yes, I think I will enjoy being… friends with you."

 

Lee took it in hers without hesitation, squeezed it, feeling the bonds of some sort of camaraderie forming.

 

Ginny, looking at their hands, then pointed out, "You do remember I murdered your parents in cold blood, don't you?"

 

"Don't care," Lee said, now managing to feel a little irritated even in the thrall of good fortune, because Jesus Christ she got the idea already. Ginny was a very bad man who had done very bad things and Lee was a very bad person for disregarding all of it.

 

Ginny laughed, an entirely too charming and girlish thing for her persona. "I guess not."

 

It was at this point, normally, that Lee would let that hand go and they'd go on with their lives. In fact, a large part of Lee was more than willing to do just that.

 

However, the luck potion in her stomach was telling her that letting go was a Bad Idea, and that what Lee had to do now was use it to pull Ginny forward and in for what had to be the most cliché and ridiculous of kisses.

 

In fact, that not doing this very action was a Bad Idea that would lead to Bad Things. Not that doing it wouldn't lead to Bad Things, but it would lead to more tolerable Bad Things than anything else.

 

"Lee, you know, you can let go of my hand now," Ginny said, but Lee kept squeezing, feeling her eyes widen as her internal war continued over going with the flow or saying to hell with this luck potion.

 

Except, goddammit, it'd gotten her a lot of information so far (and an alliance with someone who otherwise seemed like he'd been intent on smothering her in her sleep or else killing all of her friends in some mustache twirling routine of evil). And more, drunk on good fortune, it was really difficult to remember why even doing distasteful things was distasteful if it wasn't for the greater luck.

 

"Lee," Ginny prompted again, trying to slide her hand out of Lee's, and Lee now knew that with every second she did nothing the clock was ticking down, and the moment would be lost.

 

And then Lee, at some point, would be utterly screwed and left to Tequila's mustache twirling schemes.

 

So Lee pulled her forward, wrapping one arm around Ginny's waist and her other to tilt Ginny's face upwards while Lee slowly, carefully, brushed her lips across hers.

 

Lee's first kiss, Lee remembered with some alarm as well as distaste. Granted, she'd never really thought about romance or kissing in anything but the abstract. But she'd thought, well, she’d always thought it would be Minato, still obliviously testing one wand after the next.

 

Certainly, Weasley Ginny had never come to mind.

 

Then, slowly and lightly, Lee pulled back, while Ginny just stared at her with wide eyes while gingerly pressing pale fingers to her lips. Clearly wondering what the bloody hell had just happened, which, Lee would like to know as well.

 

Especially since Minato was going to kill her. Well, Lee thought, as she finally saw the necessary sparks emerge from a wand, if he ever found out.

 

"Well," Lee said, breaking the wards around them and standing with a grin she didn't quite feel, "It looks like it's my turn."

 

Ginny said nothing, didn't even look, still had fingers pressed to her lips and those wide eyes as if she was in complete and utter shock. Lee walked over to Ollivander, pressing a hand on Minato's shoulder and smiling to congratulate him, then paused.

 

It… would be a very Bad Idea to kiss him right now, to wipe away the past moment and pretend it hadn't happened. It would more than undo everything she'd worked towards, everything this day had been for, but all the same.

 

" _Congratulations, Minato,_ " Lee said, taking her hand from his shoulder and watching as he stepped back to watch as Lee prepared to get her own wand.

 

Of course, she thought drily, maybe she shouldn't have been surprised that it was the brother wand of the English nin's. Who, along with being trapped in Konoha, was apparently also possessing little Weasley girls with no Englishman the wiser.


	31. And They Call it Puppy Love

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Commissioned for an earlier update by kuranshiori on tumblr.

_In which Tom Riddle is confused about everything, Tobirama concedes that Lee may have had a point, and a few misconceptions are brought to light._

* * *

 

The brother wand, made of holly with the feather of a phoenix at its core, a wand whose future owner he had always wondered about yet never truly allowed himself to picture. After all, he had thought, who could ever hope to match him so well as to claim the twin of his own yew wand? What kind of person could even come close to it?

Nevertheless, fifty years later, and here she was. He had met her face to face, had spent a day with her in London, and now was walking down the streets of Hogsmeade towards the hidden entrance that would sneak them back into the castle, and he still couldn't decide what it was that had made the brother wand choose her.

Eleanor Lily Potter. How long had that name been skulking about in his subconscious like a bitter poison? Sometimes it seemed he had been reaching for her, seething about her existence, even when he had first shoved himself into the diary. No matter, of course, how utterly impossible that was.

When Ginny Weasley had first scribbled her name as well as the legend of his counterpart's defeat, the name had echoed, and some part of him was convinced he was born with that name on the tip of his tongue.

Eleanor Lily Potter, daughter of James and Lily Potter, last surviving member of the Potter family, and the Girl Who Lived. A girl who, against all odds and all possibilities, had defied death and destroyed the dark lord Voldemort as nothing more than an infant. And then, of course, she became the girl who disappeared, taken into hiding after the war at Albus Dumbledore's discretion and never seen nor heard from again.

The basis of a legend, surely, if there ever was one, with Lord Voldemort anywhere but at its center.

Of course, the first thing he'd thought when he'd heard that tale and her name along with it, was that he was going to find her and kill her. Where every wizard in England had failed, where Albus Dumbledore himself had failed, he would find her and make her regret having had the misfortune of being born.

She hadn't come, though.

He'd drained the life, the very soul, from Ginny Weasley's body, and Eleanor Lily Potter never made an appearance in 1992. Ginny had had faith, even past the very end, that somehow the Girl Who Lived would come for her. However, she never did, and in the end as he'd opened his eyes in the dark chamber, listening to water drip down the walls and into the lake, he'd thought that she should have.

She'd missed her cue, and there was some inherent indecency in that.

It really had been dreadfully anticlimactic, he noted to himself even now in annoyance. He'd wanted… Well, even now he wasn't really sure, but feeling his solid and physical body down there for the first time in half a century, still dressed in his prefect's robes, finally free of his self-imposed hell, it had felt so empty and insignificant.

He'd sat there, beside Ginny's cooling, empty body, unsure of what he was doing or why he was there except perhaps that he was waiting for Ellie Potter much the way that Ginny had been waiting for Ellie Potter. Neville Longbottom and friends, though they tried, were simply not a match for him, and goddammit he deserved her! He deserved the prophesied child, the knight in shining armor, and if there ever was a time to save Hogwarts or her people it was with the return of the heir of Slytherin!

He had set the bloody stage for her, complete with a basilisk and the resurrection of her greatest enemy, and she still hadn't shown!

In the end, as he'd sat there with Ginny, it had all sort of dripped from him into a dull sort of feeling of melancholy. He'd leaned against the statue of Salazar Slytherin, staring down at the diary, at the girl, and all that he ever was or could be.

And he realized, to his dull horror and sudden terrible mirth, that though he was Tom Marvolo Riddle, Voldemort had been stripped from him by his lesser half. It was neither his past, his present, nor his future, however much he had chanted it to himself in the diary.

However much he deserved that title, had sacrificed himself for its mere potential. And look how that turned out, he had thought to himself, the other Tom Riddle had squandered it over an infant.

Some of the followers he knew, the ones who had made themselves bloody obvious, but he didn't know them well enough. Each and every one of them belonged to that other self of his; he would have known their ins and outs the way that Tom had known the ins and outs of every one of his peers. These men were fifty years outside of Tom's reach, wherever they had fled, wherever they hid themselves as men or rats. Suddenly, it had felt entirely too daunting, too pointless, to immediately take up the abandoned mantle of Voldemort.

So, he exited the chamber with Ginny Weasley's borrowed face, and the half-hearted thought that he would bide his time and start from scratch. Hogwarts would not be so terrible a second time; a well-placed ear in Dumbledore's inner circle could certainly be beneficial, and who knew, perhaps the Girl Who Lived would finally make an appearance. And when she did, when she finally showed up, he would be there and have himself a very good day. In the meantime, he abided, and he blamed Ellie Potter for each and every insignificant moment that encompassed his current existence.

If Ellie Potter had been there, he thought, if she had had the decency to be on time for once in her life, then none of this would have happened. He wouldn't currently be posing as a thirteen-year-old girl, a goddamn Weasley no less, stuck inside Hogwarts watching his idiot pseudo-brother flounder about with Granger the know-it-all mudblood and Longbottom the squib.

And then two years later, just like that, there'd been the Goblet of Fire and the unbreakable contract of a champion. Everyone had chattered about honor, glory, fortune, and that all too disappointing age limit, but he had just stared at it and let the disguise of Ginny drift from him. Inside its blue flames, flickering there, was the opportunity that was entirely too good to miss. Just a name, a school, and then a binding magical contract that even Eleanor Lily Potter couldn't ignore.

Of course, he thought with some annoyance as her eyes met his, she had to ruin that as well by being anything but what he had been preparing himself for.

Ginny had had a tendency, not an uncommon one, to paint Eleanor Lily Potter as something of a white knight, a prince, whose sole flaw had been that she was born a woman. A girl with her mother's eyes and bright hair color, her father's chaotic curls, and a scar in the shape of a lightning bolt on her forehead from where the dark lord had cursed her. More importantly, someone whose innate heroism, Gryffindor nature, shone through her skin until it would be almost blinding to look at directly as she charged off to save the kingdom from the most unsightly of dark creatures and wizards.

Lee Eru of Konohagakure, he thought, was anything but that. She had her mother's hair and eyes, her father's curls, but that was about where the preconceptions ended. Feminine-looking, yes, he supposed, but also with a toned athlete's build not at all hidden by her militaristic and almost oriental looking uniform. Even her scar, he thought, was routinely hidden by a headband, and beneath that, supposedly hidden by foreign runes tattooed across her skin.

The sword strapped to her waist was that of a samurai's rather than an English knight's, and accompanying this was not a wand in a holster but instead a variety of scrolls as well as a pouch of throwing knives.

(But she hadn't seemed to need a wand, he had thought in wonder and terror, as she had performed feats of magic he couldn't have dreamed of without one. Vanishing, summoning, Apparition through Hogwarts wards, each no simple feat of magic, if it was possible magic at all. And all of it, he thought bitterly, without even breaking a sweat.)

She also had an inherent, unshakeable, and frankly terrifying confidence that made it seem as if she would and could gut you simply if you got on her nerves a little too much. More, as if, when she had Apparated straight into the Great Hall, across continents and through Hogwarts' centuries old wards that had never been broken, she truly had intended to kill them to a man just for the presumption of daring to summon her with the Goblet of Fire.

And she was beautiful.

Here he stopped, looked away from her, cursing, as he saw her lips twist into a wry sort of amused smile, and wondered not for the first time today what the bloody hell was wrong with him. Certainly, he thought, there was something bloody wrong with her.

The first night after her arrival he'd stayed up trying to think excitedly of some way to get rid of her, whether to have her go quietly and quickly or out with a bang, but then with some dismay he'd realized that he'd have to be capable of doing it at all. That she could somehow, impossibly, apparate into and out of Hogwarts when he himself couldn't. That perhaps he was getting something more than he bargained for, and that maybe this required a bit more thought than he had expected, and maybe a fourteen-year-old girl was not so easily handled as he'd been fantasizing for the past two years.

Except, there was no joy, no honor, no vengeance in attempting to murder someone in cold blood who both knew already and could hardly care less! She had looked at Ginny Weasley without pity, without any hint of compassion, anger, or guilt, and had asked if Dumbledore was aware that Ginny Weasley had been dead since the Spring of 1992.

And then, he thought as his fingers strayed towards his lips again, of course she had…

In his later years of Hogwarts, before the basilisk, girls had suddenly become the "it" topic in the Slytherin dorm. Tom had always found it a bit insulting and pedantic, but if the aristocrats wanted to talk girls then by god he was going to talk girls.

Lineage and money were considered obvious factors, but more than that, there was this profound and newfound appreciation and lust over the female form. Lucretia Black was consistently rated the most attractive girl in the whole bloody school, not so much for her face (which was considered nice enough), but her heaving chest, which always looked as if it had belonged on the cover of a bodice ripper. Moaning Myrtle—poor, mudblood, plain, and unbearably obnoxious, was dead last every single time.

Tom had nodded along, had quickly learned to answer Lucretia, but had truthfully not given it too much thought at the time. Except, that was, to think that Lucretia was rather dull, if nice to look at and filthy rich. He had had no real interest in her other than the possibility of gaining access to the Black library.

Then again, he'd had no real interest in anyone.

No, it wasn't until the diary, when he’d suddenly had decades of time on his hands, that he turned himself to the interesting hobby of figuring out exactly what the Tom Riddle out there in the real world might want.

After all, after conquering magical Britain, even with his immortality, Tom Riddle might perhaps take a wife and start some divine lineage. Or, who knew, perhaps he'd take a male lover; anything was possible, he supposed. So, in the confines of his paper cage and madness, he'd imagined himself a throne and set about the hobby of making himself a consort.

It had been surprisingly difficult, for all that it kept the endless tedium, the ennui and despair, at bay.

At first, he had thought of that classic femme fatale type: dark hair, dark piercing eyes, a mistress of the Dark Arts who would appreciate his mastery and complement it with her own. A future student of his, a follower, perhaps. However, she grew dull rather quickly, as had a male version when he'd wondered if it was just women period who were boring.

The trouble was, he'd eventually thought to himself, that there was no opposite or equal to Tom Riddle. He had always been an island unto himself…

When he first heard of Ellie Potter, he'd imagined to himself a golden prince of a woman, the last person in the world that he or anyone else would ever have expected. He'd sat upon the throne in the diary, Ginny Weasley's soul falling as black rain down into the pages, and the image of Eleanor Lily Potter had grinned up at him with a blinding faith in humanity that he could simply never understand.

And he had felt some pang in his heart staring at her, though whether it was hatred, desire, or envy even he couldn't tell. He only knew that he'd plunged her own sword, the borrowed sword of Gryffindor, into her heart before she could whisper a word to him.

And he had felt… No, he had always felt so truly and utterly alone. It just had seemed more present in that moment, for whatever reason.

Tom Riddle knew the taste of despair, of rage, so well that he could hardly recall anything else.

Except, that there was a touch of something new, something utterly baffling and unknown, still on his tongue even an hour later as they walked this last stretch through Hogsmeade and into the castle.

And he had the terrible thought, as his eyes kept moving towards her, tracing her pale face and her red hair and the subtle growing curves of her body, that her name had been on the tip of his tongue even before he heard it. That perhaps, for even longer than he had thought, he had been waiting for her.

And that he had never kissed anyone before now, never been kissed by anyone before now, and she had done it so lightly, so quickly, that it might not have happened at all.

"You alright there, Weasel?" He blinked, looked up, and found the other redhead, Uzumaki, looking down at him with a rather unamused and knowing look. Like she damn well knew every thought going through his head and was not going to put up with his bullshit.

She had no idea, he thought bitterly and with some dark amusement, just what she was dealing with.

When he killed Ellie Potter… He stopped himself, found himself thinking back to Lee's only condition, her only warning, said with complete seriousness and so much magic in the air that he could taste it. That he could do whatever he liked to England, so long as he didn't lay a finger on Konoha.

And in that moment, strange and surreal as it was, he had believed her. More, he had not wanted to…

If he killed Ellie Potter and her friends, he amended to himself, Uzumaki would be the first to go.

"I'm fine, it's just been something of an exhausting day," he said in that tone Ginny had always reserved for when she wanted to appear politer than she was, the kind of voice she would have used to endear herself Ellie Potter, "That and, well, we may lose house points for my Gryffindor grandchildren for this."

"Well, aren't you the little invalid," Kushina replied, her look, if possible, even flatter and more unimpressed than before.

Jesus Christ, was it really a cultural thing? The boy, Minato Namikaze, had seemed polite and charming enough (he would have done very well in Slytherin), but Kushina Uzumaki and Lee Eru both seemed to make a significant point of being as blunt, insulting, and tactless as possible.

Even now Minato was rubbing the back of his head, cringing as if this was a regular and expected occurrence that he could do nothing about, while Ellie, Lee, just…

She looked back at him, with those haunting green eyes that seemed to see straight to the heart of him, straight through Ginny Weasley's skin without even having to meet his eyes directly. He wondered then, if even in the great hall on Halloween night, she had managed to look through the crowd and see Tom Riddle sitting among them.

He looked away from her, instead focused on the other girl, who for all that she could perhaps be perceptive, mostly seemed obnoxious.

"What is your problem with me?" Ginny asked her point blank, again in a manner that wasn't all that alien to Ginny (as when politeness would fade her temper tended to rear its head, for all that it had not saved her), "I didn't have to get you into London, you know."

Or get them to Gringotts and through the entire ordeal of getting Ellie Potter's vault without a key, or even get them into the bookshops, or Ollivanders. Honestly, Tom was being exceedingly helpful and polite, even if his entire intention on guiding them was to gather information on how to best dispose of Ellie Potter and make her rue the day she was born.

However, they didn't know that.

"I know," Kushina said, as if Ginny had taken the words right out of her mouth, "I also know that you're laying it on a little thick, believe it."

"Uzumaki," Minato chided, but the girl hardly seemed admonished. In fact, seemed a bit emboldened by his opposition, like it was something she had likely been seeking. There was a spark of determination, of competitive drive, in her deep blue eyes, an odd almost violet color, and a jagged grin grew across her pale features.

"Oh, come on, Namikaze," Uzumaki chided in turn, looking entirely too pleased with herself as she leered over at the blonde, "Don't blame me if you end up in some weird love triangle between you, Lee, and Tequila Weasel."

"It's Ginny!" Tom corrected, flushing desperately, and to his horror not faking it either. A glance towards Lee, though, and she was remaining oddly cool and collected, apparently not shaken at all, which somehow made it all even worse.

There was some uncomfortable warm, twisting feeling in his stomach, something he prayed to god was the onset of the flu but suspected was something far worse.

This… This had never happened to him before. His hands were even sweating, and it was bloody November. More, why was this happening now? It really couldn't happen this quickly, could it? Just this morning he'd been trying to figure out how to best kill her, what he'd monologue down to her while she was in her death throes, wondering if Shakespeare was a bit too Muggle and cliché, but no longer quite feeling that "I am Tom Marvolo Riddle, it's an anagram, bitch!" speech he'd had planned back in 1992.

And sure, she'd been in his every thought for almost the past two years, obnoxiously absent as she was, but this couldn't really be happening. This didn't happen to Tom Riddle, it just didn't, so it couldn't be happening now and he was going to ignore any sign that it was happening.

(His lips, he thought in some horror, were still tingling.)

He needed a plan, he needed some kind of a plan, he…

Ron and company would likely be expecting some kind of a report. Yes, they'd corner him as soon as he got back to the Gryffindor table, and he could certainly throw them a bone or two. He'd planned to, even, perhaps set the golden trio and thus Albus Dumbledore himself against her (because how beautiful would it be for Dumbledore to, in fear, destroy the one thing that might save him and his people). She was foreign, dangerous, all too likely steeped in dark magic, and if that didn't make the old man shake in terror then Tom didn't know what would.

Dumbledore's little princess, the savior of wizarding Britain, had been corrupted by dark wizards of the east without ever setting a foot inside Hogwarts.

Except, he thought dully, Lee Eru, as she called herself, was doing all the footwork for him. She had divorced herself from Ellie Potter completely, even rejected her name, and with her foreign friends in the castle each armed as a muggle to the teeth, she had made it patently clear that whatever she was now it was no longer English.

He hardly needed to say a word against her; he was more than certain Albus Dumbledore was already busily making up his mind, desperately trying to salvage the situation as he shoved the girl into his golden trio's tender grasp.

Which, of course, was only going to make things worse in short order.

Except, then what was he going to do? He couldn't exactly bring the basilisk out again—at least, not without Hagrid conveniently hanging around to throw at the Wizengamot or a ruined diary to throw at a suspicious Dumbledore.

More, with his heart pounding inside his suddenly cluttered head, he found himself horribly too interested to plot his revenge. He… He wanted to see how she'd react, in different situations, see what made Lee Eru tick in ways so different than he'd ever imagined. He wanted to see if she was as powerful as she seemed, as dangerous as she seemed, and…

Oh God, what was this?

He glanced up. The language had changed, and Uzumaki and Namikaze were no longer bickering in English but had instead slipped into their mother tongue. It… sounded an awful lot like Japanese, but he'd hardly call himself an expert.

They hardly looked Japanese, he thought, with their odd barrage of hair colors. Namikaze had hair the eye-watering color of lemons, Uzumaki a deep and dark red that almost matched Ginny's, and the other boy's hair a paler and purer white than even the Malfoys. Their features, he supposed, looked oriental enough but they were not what would have come to mind when he thought of someone from Japan.

Still, here he thought, was something he could do. Watch the friends, the girl, and form the bridge between England and Konoha (because Ron and pals were sure to blow that to hell any minute now), and wait to make up his own mind.

Lee slowed, enough that she was walking beside him and could lean down and whisper in his ear. Her voice was soft, low, and laced with magic that threatened death upon him with more power than he could possibly comprehend. "Remember, all these worlds are yours, except _Konoha_. Attempt no landing there."

And then she walked ahead, catching Namikaze's narrowed, concerned, curious blue eye while she smiled back at him as if there was nowhere in the world she would rather be than walking by his side.

And Tom, in numb horror, couldn't help but acknowledge he had a type.

He liked them tall, athletic, red-headed, tactless, chronically late, and able to eviscerate him at the slightest whim. He should have gone for the femme fatale.

* * *

The boy had not come home; not by the afternoon, and not by early evening, either. By the time the abhorrently fat uncle had entered the place, turning purple with rage then white with fear at the sight of Tobirama in his doorway, Tobirama had managed to learn that the boy wasn't expected.

Just as Hogwarts was a boarding school, out in the middle of nowhere in Scotland, Dursley Dudley had been sent off to some school by the name of Smeltings and would not be back until the summer. By that point, Tobirama, sitting in this house in this strange cookie cutter civilian village, had not had the patience nor the energy to hunt down wherever the hell Smeltings was.

The aunt's blood, he supposed, would have to do for now.

So, one hiraishin to the gates of Hogwarts later, and he was back in that migraine-inducing din of chakra that he had not missed at all during his afternoon outside of the English hidden village. Not quite as obnoxious as Diagon Alley, but certainly a close second.

"I'm going to have to take vacations from this," he muttered to himself as he shuddered, passing through the rather substantial wards surrounding the castle. Not, he thought, the same kind of wards lying dormant around Number 4 Privet Drive.

He'd have to find time to study them, to study English fuinjutsu in general, since they had been kind enough to print many seemingly in-depth textbooks on the subject. More, had offered to teach both Namikaze and Uzumaki the foundations of it with a curious ease. It was… a very strange way of doing things. Tobirama supposed that he had always had the Senju clan notes, Mito's notes taken with her from the Uzumaki, but fuinjutsu even more than other branches was generally hoarded and passed down from a master to a particularly promising student.

It was a finicky and very dangerous art, capable of miracles and abominations beyond the scope of any other branch of jutsu. To see symbols and seals etched out in beginner textbooks, well, he was honestly rather surprised England was still standing.

Of course, he thought as he walked through the halls filled with chattering portraits, moving staircases, and furniture that could not seem to sit still with the chakra running rampant inside of it, it was a wonder their sensors hadn't all died of epileptic fits. It wasn't the same as when the kyuubi had razed Konoha, that miasma of chakra-infused hatred that had killed so many along with the fires, but it certainly was anything but pleasant.

"Tobi, oh good, you're back!"

And Tobirama's headache just got ten times worse. With a sigh he glanced up to where Hashirama was running towards him down the hallway with all the enthusiasm that only five-year-olds, Eru Lee, and his idiot older brother could muster.

More, Tobirama thought, Hashirama had that look on his face like something had happened that he knew Tobirama was going to hate.

"What is it?"

Hashirama skidded to a stop right in front of him, now wearing that look that he couldn't believe Tobirama had caught onto his act, despite the fact that Tobirama always caught on to Hashirama's flimsy pretenses.

"Oh, well." Hashirama rubbed at the back of his head, grinning. "So, Lee may have this thing called detention."

"And?" Tobirama asked, because he couldn't say he was shocked; Lee was notorious for the amount of detentions she'd racked up while attending the academy. Of course, Eru Lee was no longer a ten-year-old girl, but he supposed if the English were going to keep the children in school until seventeen then they'd serve out detentions until they were seventeen.

Now, it was slightly impressive that she'd managed to piss off an English professor this early, but he wasn't surprised.

"She has detention for two weeks, wait, no, three weeks now, with me, and I… don't know what to do?" Hashirama added sheepishly, smiling at the end as if that would make his words easier to swallow, to which Tobirama raised his eyebrows as he was unwillingly impressed by the sheer number in such a short amount of time.

"What did she do this time?" Tobirama asked, walking along down the hallway and waiting for Hashirama to catch up.

There were very few students about, he noted, and he'd missed the timeslot they'd given him for dinner. This likely meant that Hashirama had been loitering about waiting for Tobirama to show up. Which, he supposed he was flattered, but mostly he felt that it meant there was something else to all of this that his brother hadn't gotten around to yet.

"See, I actually asked Lee that, and she said that she did exactly what the professor asked, and he decided he didn't like it," Hashirama said, looking more than a little confused, "And I asked Professor Snape and he… Well, I don't think he said what she did, actually."

That was helpfully vague on both ends. Did what he asked for… That could be any number of truly ominous things that Tobirama didn't want to contemplate. He found his imagination running rampant all the same though, as he thought over just what Lee might have gotten up to out of eyesight.

Hashirama, however, jerked him from his thoughts by pulling him down a hallway and towards the roaming staircases. "We also have a meeting with the headmaster, as the four of them skipped their afternoon classes to go to _London_ and buy wands instead."

Hashirama interjected before Tobirama could say anything to that, "Don't ask me, they sent me a note, and they had to do it sometime. All the _English_ techniques, Tobi, rely on wands, and you really can't get by in a single course without them. I thought it was fine—after all, if they didn't do it now what were they going to do for the rest of the week? Although, they could have waited and taken me with them."

Hashirama didn't wait for Tobirama to respond as he continued, "Plus, apparently their next professor, Binns, hadn't even noticed they were gone. They only found out because he'd been repeating, 'Potter', for a half-hour and a student went to tell them that Lee and everyone else had never made it to class after lunch. Also, did you know he's a ghost?"

Tobirama was still catching up to the first bit, but couldn't help but feel his mouth open at the last. "What?"

"Really, the professor is a ghost," Hashirama said as they both stopped at the staircase, now missing and wandering over to their left. Not quite far enough though, Tobirama thought, to not be made by a jump. Both he and Hashirama tensed for a moment, then leapt, landing on the staircase among a few gaping students before running and jumping to land on the next platform.

"You mean the man's chakra is…"

Hashirama pointed towards a silver silhouette of a man, a glimmering hint of chakra still bound to the mortal earth, floating dazedly through the halls as if he couldn't quite remember where he was. "I mean he's one of those things, teaching a class. History I think."

"That…" Tobirama stopped, paused, suddenly feeling very uncomfortable. He supposed that he didn't not believe in ghosts; after all, that would simply be chakra of the deceased that was clinging to the mortal plane rather than transitioning to the pure world.

However, the idea that those with strong enough regrets could cling to the living world… He had known so many with such strong regrets and never seen a hint of them, not unless he or someone else had forced them back into existence with edo tensei. He had had his own deep regrets—despite passing the hat to Hiruzen, he hadn't known if the man was ready for it—and even he had left.

Dying had been like…

He didn't really know, just that he couldn't truly remember it, had felt only a strange comforting emptiness in which Senju Tobirama was not Senju Tobirama at all.

Tobirama couldn't imagine anyone naturally fighting against that current, not without the help of kinjutsu or fuinjutsu from the mortal side, binding their spirits to this place…

"Why," he asked slowly, "Would they do that?"

The chakra infused furniture, the plethora of fuinjutsu, the utter reliance on the wand—that he could at least begin to understand. To bind the dead for eternity though, not even in living flesh, and enslave them to teach history courses?

After a day of hunting down Eru Lee's origins, having found her hidden among abusive civilians where anyone in the world could have found her, he found himself unwillingly coming to the conclusion that Lee seemed to have reached at least a decade ago. "I don't understand these people."

Hashirama opened his mouth, likely to excuse them as they kept climbing, but as soon as the words were said they kept rushing out of Tobirama's mouth, "Every word she said was true. Her relatives really were civilians, every neighbor a civilian, and great painful lengths were taken to make sure she believed she lived in a world of nothing but civilians."

Certainly, he thought, her aunt seemed to have gone entirely out of her way to make the girl believe that her English wizard parents were nothing more than your common drunks. As if that kind of slander would have stopped the assassination or kidnapping attempts by a foreign village. As it had not, he thought, stopped the girl from simply leaving when it suited her.

"They really did put her in a cupboard!"

And if they had done that, he thought, if those words out of Lee's mouth hadn't been an exaggeration or a lie, then what else was true? For all that Lee didn't often speak about her days in England, each detail she'd let slip had been discomfiting. If he had to believe all of this, then perhaps he had no choice but to consider Lee's insistence that England itself was nothing more than an elaborate genjutsu…

No, he wouldn't go that far. Not, at least, until he was forced to.

Down that path lay madness.

"Oh, well…" Hashirama rubbed at the back of his head, looking as if he was searching for something, anything, to make sense of that. "I'm sure they had their reasons?"

He was sure they had their reasons. Well, Tobirama was sure they had their reasons as well, but whatever they happened to be, Tobirama hadn't stumbled on them yet. More, perhaps more damning, the English nin who had bound himself to her chakra, the man these people feared to the extent of banishing his very name, had been just as perplexed by the idea that Lee would have been left with civilian relatives rather than even becoming a ward of the state.

And for all the man had misdirected, lied, Tobirama suspected that he had not been lying about that. That he, too, simply could not understand these people.

Finally, they reached the spiral staircase, guarded by great stone hulking statues, which Hashirama compelled to move aside as he declared in English, " _Lemon Drops_ "

"It's a kind of candy," Hashirama said as they stepped up together, apparently rather proud of the fact that he had figured it out, "The headmaster's office is full of them… They don't taste very good though."

Tobirama wasn't sure what he wanted to say to that, except that he was glad Hashirama was getting the most out of this cultural experience, but by that point they opened the door and walked in on four familiar faces, the English headmaster, and a new one.

The fourth was a little English girl, Gryffindor by the color of her tie, with hair red enough to be an Uzumaki but… It was hard to tell with the veritable din of chakra in the castle let alone this room, but something about her seemed oddly familiar.

At the sight of him Lee groaned, clutching her head, and said, "Oh, thank god, you're here. Please tell him we're competent adults who have wands now and can go home."

Him, of course, being none other than Dumbledore Albus, who was looking down at the five teenagers in a cross between concern, disappointment, and a stray sense of wariness. At Tobirama and Hashirama's entrance, he looked over to them as well. " _Good evening, Professor Senju. I suspect your brother has informed you, then, of your students' very… eventful first day._ "

Tobirama stepped in fully, glanced down at Lee who looked as if she wished she was anywhere else in the world, and noted, " _I was told that Lee has already pushed her first professor to his limit, and that the four of them left to purchase wands in Diagon Alley._ "

Lee gave him a rather insulted look, as if she would hardly have called whatever she did to Professor Snape 'pushing him to his limit', but Tobirama paid her no mind.

" _And they really did leave me a note,_ " Hashirama cut in, holding up the extended note, written in their own language as opposed to English, for Dumbledore's inspection.

Dumbledore sighed at the sight of it, rubbing his temples in a manner that seemed at odds with the persona he wished to cultivate. Tobirama had the feeling that Dumbledore was the sort of man who wished he had been Hashirama (certainly he dressed like his older brother) but was in truth a creature far different.

A man, Tobirama thought, who for his own reasons and purposes had thought it best that Lee be placed with the Dursleys rather than under the protection of a clan. What that meant, Tobirama couldn't say he knew; perhaps there were very definitive and good reasons for it, but nonetheless…

Nonetheless, he would never have placed Eru Lee in the custody of the Dursleys.

" _I am afraid that we may have brushed over many of the rules of Hogwarts, given your sudden arrival. That, or I said them too quickly and without enough emphasis,_ " Dumbledore said after a moment's pause, " _Students are subject to a nightly curfew, are not to enter the Forbidden Forest, are not to perform magic in the hallways, and are not permitted to leave school grounds during term without the express permission of and being accompanied by a staff member._ "

This last was said to Hashirama, who was still waving the note about, as if it was evidence enough of his express permission and blessing to visit London. Tobirama glanced down at Minato, who was quietly holding a newly purchased wand in hand.

Minato looked back up, smiled politely, and noted in their own language, "After _Potions_ , we didn't think there was much of a point in attending the next class without buying wands first."

He offered no other excuse or explanation, but then, Tobirama supposed he had not needed one. Certainly, Hashirama hadn't expected one, and Tobirama for his own part didn't now either. He perfectly understood why they had left.

" _Rules, of course, that Miss Weasley at the very least, should have remembered,_ " Dumbledore said, blue eyes falling to the red-headed English girl who flushed under the attention.

" _Sir, they were heading out anyways, if I hadn't gone with them then—_ " the girl started, standing up from her seat and placing her hands on the desk even as she flushed.

The man seemed a bit amused, however, and said, " _You know, Miss Weasley, there would have been other chances to meet Miss Potter._ "

The girl's flush became more pronounced, almost matching the color of her hair, and with a pout she crossed her arms and sat back down, glaring mulishly over at the headmaster.

Lee, for her own part, glanced at the girl with a look that was hopelessly exasperated, as if she couldn't quite believe she'd just had to sit there and witness this.

As for Tobirama, he just… stared at the man. Once again, he was struck by the odd thought that things were more different here than he had ever even begun to expect. That both Lee and the English nin, at the same time, could be right. That there were shinobi here who were not shinobi at all, and that perhaps, they simply would never understand one another.

He had the sudden thought that the vial of blood stored in a scroll on his waist would be inconceivable to this man. That to him, the idea that someone could and would obtain such a thing was inconceivable.

So Tobirama looked at the man, met his eyes with his own alarming red, and decided to make all the differences between their two people hopelessly clear. " _I believe that you yourself are under a few misconceptions regarding Minato Namikaze, Eleanor Lily Potter, Kushina Uzumaki, and Haru Matsuda._ "

He motioned towards the four of them casually, with a single pale hand. " _They graduated from our academy, our basic education, years ago. Uzumaki, Namikaze, and Eru then passed the exams to earn the ranking of_ chunin _, what seems to be the equivalent of your Hogwarts graduates, a year ago. By our standards they are adults, perfectly capable of judging their limits, leading missions, and making decisions in the absence of superior officers._ "

Then, with a smile and a glance down at the four reprimanded shinobi, he noted, " _Frankly, I am only mildly surprised that they bothered to show up for class in the first place, when it became clear that your wands truly were necessary._ "

" _Wow,_ " Hashirama said after a moment's pause, _"I wish you'd been here half an hour ago. When I tried to say it, well, it just didn't come out right._ "

Hashirama was many things, perhaps the most inspirational man Tobirama knew, but he was certainly not the best at putting people in their place with cold, hard, logic. That, as always, was left to Tobirama.

The man was silent for a good long moment, looking down at them, at Lee specifically, with something akin to pity, along with a growing wariness. Perhaps, Tobirama thought, the man was realizing the repercussions of Lee's disappearance. She no longer belonged to England, had never belonged to their people.

Now that Tobirama thought about it, now that he'd had a day to take it in, the insistence on going to classes, throwing them in a tower with students their own age, it all seemed a bit like an ill-informed recruitment pitch. As if through time and exposure he could turn Lee Eru back into the English schoolgirl she should have been.

Or perhaps the man was simply insane. He dressed like he was, and certainly sticking her with the Dursleys had done the English village no favors.

" _Nevertheless,_ " Dumbledore said, " _They are currently attending Hogwarts, living in the Hogwarts dormitories, and are expected to abide by Hogwarts’ rules._ "

" _Hogwarts’ rules,_ " Tobirama repeated slowly, " _Appear to expect them to have come with a wand._ "

More, while Hogwarts’ rules apparently would not allow them to leave the school unattended, they were perfectly fine with Lee Eru having been entered into a deadly competition without her consent and with her chakra drained should she fail to comply.

Surely, leaving the academy for an afternoon, after having informed Hashirama, could hardly be anything nearly as grievous.

" _An oversight on our part,_ " Dumbledore conceded rather awkwardly, " _We had assumed your people had wands of your own. Still, one of our staff members could have escorted you—_ "

Tobirama wasn't sure what it was, exactly. Perhaps it was Diagon Alley, perhaps it was the chakra infesting the castle, or perhaps it was those hours of sitting in the Dursley household waiting for Dursley Dudley to make an appearance, but he found that he just couldn't sit here and take it anymore. " _For a man who is personally responsible for having lost the girl for ten years, I would think you'd recognize that you have little room to speak over losing her for a few hours._ "

"Oh," he heard Lee mutter to Minato, whispering in his ear, "I guess he's going for it… Minato, does this mean I'm still lucky? I thought the headache meant I was coming down from my luck high, but I didn't think I'd be lucky enough to see this."

"I wouldn't know, Lee," Minato said distractedly, his attention on Tobirama and Dumbledore Albus.

" _I believe, Mister Senju, that you are well aware that I had little to do with her—_ "

" _You sent her to live with civilians, civilian relatives who loathed anything with_ chakra _, when she possesses more_ chakra _than should be physically possible, and you expected that to go well. You may not have seen her off to_ Konoha _, but you can hardly say that you didn't pave the road to get there._ " Either by kidnapping, attack, or the strange truth of a four-year-old Eleanor Lily Potter simply leaving and never looking back.

Somehow, against all odds, ending up in Konoha when Tobirama had yet to see the elemental nations listed on any goddamn map in England.

"Wait a minute," Lee murmured, and then, stumbling out of her chair and coming between Tobirama and Dumbledore, asked, "Did you meet the Dursleys?!"

"Did you really think I wouldn't?" he asked in turn, because judging by her expression, she really thought that, or else hadn't realized exactly how much damning evidence she'd given Tobirama to allow him to track her relatives down.

It'd been almost pathetically simple once he'd managed to track down Surrey and then Little Whinging.

"Oh, I really am out of luck," Lee said in rather overdramatic despair, "Minato, let it be known, that stuff only works for about… four hours. And even when it works it… Well, I still don't know if it worked."

"Duly noted," Minato responded, as if he had any idea at all what Lee was even talking about. Then again, Tobirama thought in exasperation, he probably did. Those two had the kind of bond you'd expect from twins, and Tobirama pitied the boy for understanding entirely too much of the garbage that came out of her mouth.

" _Miss Potter, if you could step aside,_ " Dumbledore asked. Tobirama accomplished this by none too gently shoving Eru Lee out of the way.

" _I think that we shall be providing our own housing after all. They may attend Hogwarts, will abide your rules while class is in session, but otherwise will be under the jurisdiction of_ Konoha _just as the Durmstrang students are their own headmaster in that ship of theirs,_ " Tobirama concluded, allowing the man to do what he would with this news, " _I trust the grounds behind the castle, outside of your Forbidden Forest, will work?_ "

The man looked as if he dearly wanted to say no, that it was on the tip of his tongue, but he seemed to recognize that Tobirama would do it regardless of what the man thought. That, if push came to shove, they could pull out completely and only drop precious Eleanor Lily Potter in on the school on the days of this competition of theirs.

And if it became that much harder to recruit Eru Lee or else assassinate her, then so be it. Tobirama was determined that he would not make this Dumbledore Albus', or anyone else's, job any easier than it already was.

Of course, the mood was completely ruined by Lee's honest question of, " _So, does this mean I still have detention?_ "


	32. Konoha Diplomacy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Brought to you early, in part, by frootloopgrl on tumblr.
> 
> Thanks to GlassGirlCeci on fanfiction for betaing the chapter.

_In which Tequila Weasley attempts to report back to the anxious golden trio, Team Konoha manages to alienate themselves completely, and Lee and Minato share a moment that they probably should have shared a good while ago._

* * *

 

He'd been right, or close enough to it. They didn't ambush him as soon as he sat down at the table, but only because he hadn't had a chance to sit down for dinner before he and Konoha's finest were taken straight to Dumbledore's office.

As Ginny Weasley, he'd been in Dumbledore's over-cluttered headmaster's office more than once. The décor certainly had changed from Dippet's days, and every inch of it screamed Dumbledore. There was a mysterious silver ticking machine in a corner, another different silver ticking machine right on his desk—the place was littered with garbage interwoven with items of extreme power, making you wonder which was supposed to be which.

No, fifty years later and Dumbledore had not changed. What had changed was how he treated Tom, or in this case, Ginny Weasley.

From the time he'd entered Tom's room in the orphanage, Tom had come to realize that Tom couldn't so much as sneeze without Dumbledore suspecting of some great and terrible evil. It hadn't taken Tom very long to come to this conclusion either, when a man lights all your possessions on fire within the first ten minutes of meeting you, you know you're not going to be friends.

Ginny though, oh, Ginny was different. Ginny was a poor, hapless victim, and Tom suspected that her being a little girl as opposed to a little boy helped matters along. He never would have pegged the man for it before, but he was beginning to get the idea that Dumbledore was a little bit of an unwitting misogynist.

Of course, he was always willing to suspect Dumbledore of the worst, so perhaps it was simply that Ginny was one of Tom Riddle's victims that made her so pitiable and endearing to the headmaster.

Either way, Tom certainly had no complaints about his current favored treatment.

Had Tom Riddle snuck a group of foreign teenagers out of the castle, Dumbledore would have been pushing for his expulsion. Ginny Weasley, just a pat on the head and a wagging finger told her, "You're a very naughty girl and I can see right through your little girl crush. Here, Ginny, have a lemon drop."

Then again, the man had greater concerns than a misbehaving Ginevra Weasley. Namely, his Girl-Who-Lived and all her cohorts, who had not only shot Hogwarts' rules down without sympathy, but seceded from Gryffindor Tower.

Which meant, of course, that Tom had parted ways from the group (with Lee staring straight into his soul again, goddamn her) long before reaching the tower, and was left alone to the mercies of his older brother and friends.

"Ginny, what happened?" This was Ron, always the first to pounce on her since, as her older brother, he felt it was his right and his right alone to question her.

Even as he'd obliviously let her rot right under his nose in 1992.

But, clearly, that didn't count.

Ginny sighed, brushed stray red hair out of his face (lord he hated long hair), and did his best to impersonate an offended Ginny to him. "Aren't you even going to say hello first, Ron?"

Ron flushed, backed up slightly to rub the back of his head, and the second most thoughtlessly assertive of the group stepped forward, Hermione Granger. "Ginny, you know he doesn't mean that, just… Well, they never came to History of Magic, and then we saw you go into Dumbledore's office with them, and we thought…"

Hermione Granger, as a whole, tended to irk him less than Ron Weasley, but it wasn't by much. The girl was so self-righteous it made him want to gag. And not simply self-righteous, but unable to conceive in any given situation that she didn't have the right of it both academically and morally. Hermione Granger was convinced she was the smartest and most moral person in any given room and would likely throw a vindictive fit if she ever had the slightest hint she was wrong.

Unfortunately, Hogwarts had really gone downhill since Tom attended (more to the point, he wasn't currently attending or in Hermione's year), so she actually seemed to be the best Hogwarts had to offer.

Pity for Britain.

"I took them to Diagon Alley to get wands," Ginny admitted with full, proud, honesty.

"Oh, Ginny," Hermione said in that patronizing tone that seemed to come so naturally to her, as if she certainly would never have taken them straight into the heart of magical London.

Tom put Ginny's hands on her hips, letting some of his true exasperation bleed through. "What? You know they were going to go anyway, I just made sure they actually got to the right place!"

They probably would have been fine without him; he honestly didn't know why they'd let him act as tour guide given how cagey they seemed as a whole. However, for whatever reason, Ellie Potter herself, Lee, seemed to have wanted him there as much as he wanted to be there.

(For whatever reason, right, he had a very strong suspicion what that reason was.)

"Ginny," Hermione said with a fond sigh, as if Ginny was her little sister instead of Ron's, "You know that's dangerous, who knows who's looking for her—"

"Wait, did you say get wands?" And this, finally, was Neville Longbottom.

Now, Tom didn't quite understand how he fit into the golden trio himself, or how it was that he acted as the glue holding Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger together. However, he was its quiet, timid heart, and in the heart of all their adventures never quite living up to the task at hand.

Still, he tried, he tried so very hard.

"They didn't have any," Tom said with a casual shrug, far too casual for that kind of statement, "Apparently, in Konoha, they don't use wands."

"Don't use wands?!" Now Hermione was distracted from lecturing him to the pure academic nature that had been haunting Tom's mind all day. "But how is that possible?"

Wandless, wordless magic was infamously difficult. It was one of Tom's talents that had marked him, an eleven-year-old untrained child, in Dumbledore's eyes as a threat. Most children, at best, had fits of accidental magic that they could hardly control, and those few that could control it often grew out of the ability when a wand was in their hand.

All great magics, anything true and powerful, generally had to be accomplished with a wand.

And true, he hadn't seen much of their abilities thus far as a whole, but Lee had accomplished more than he ever had without word, wand, or even hand gesture. The wand, for her, would be little more than reassuring decoration to the wizarding population.

And outside, he had noted as he'd passed by a window on the way up to the tower, the older professor Senju had transfigured a wooden cabin without a wand seemingly out of the air itself.

Tom could only shrug, though, keep his opinions to himself, and say, "I don't know, I just know they came here without them."

"Oh, oh but no wonder they didn't bother coming to History of Magic after Potions," Hermione said to herself.

"What, because Binns is so bloody boring he'd put the dead to sleep?" Ron asked, only for Hermione to jab him with her elbow.

"No, because Professor Snape made it clear that you have to have a wand in every class, Ron!" Hermione said, "After that, of course the first thing they'd do is go get a wand even without teacher supervision."

"About that," Ginny said, before they could get too far down any tangent, "I don't think they expect that."

"Expect what?" Neville asked, quiet as always, so very easy to overlook.

"Adult supervision," Ginny said slowly, "I think, where they come from, for one reason or another, each is already recognized as an adult."

Hermione laughed, like Ginny Weasley just went and said the darndest things (god, he hated her so much). "Oh, but that's ridiculous, Ginny. They're only fourteen, or maybe fifteen at best."

"Mention of command and rank was brought up," Ginny said, again slowly, this time unable to help the tone of voice that hinted that maybe the golden trio was comprised of idiots, "And the fact that they'd graduated their own academy when we were entering Hogwarts."

"What?" Ron asked, "Like when they were eleven?"

"Maybe younger." The man, Tobirama Senju, hadn't given an exact date, but years ago was still an alarming statement to a world where a student didn't graduate Hogwarts until seventeen.

Still, at that statement, the golden trio's eyes boggled and they instinctively leaned closer.

"But that's not possible!" Hermione exclaimed, "For them to have any grasp of magic, at that age, they'd have to be starting at—"

"Six," Ginny completed for her, "Maybe younger."

"Merlin," Ron breathed, "I didn't think anyone could start at six."

Tom had. In the solitude of Wools, without the benefit of size and fists to protect him, he had refined his raw and wild magic into something that could cut on command. But then, Tom was not most.

"And command? Like a military?" Hermione asked, "Are you sure you heard that right?"

He couldn't help it, Hermione found herself under the full brunt of his animosity and derision. "Have you not listened to them talk, at all? All they do is reference superior officers, orders, jurisdiction, and command!"

He was more than certain they'd openly admit to being in some kind of magical militia—in fact, he believed they already had! Ninja, that was what they'd called it, interchanged with a different word, shinobi. And what was it that they had offhandedly called wizards they'd passed on the street? Civilians.

No, with hesitation, as if they could not quite believe that anyone with magic would not belong in the heart of a military.

As if there was something wrong with the idea of a magical civilian.

"That's horrible," Neville breathed, face paling, the first among them to realize what it likely meant to be part of a magical army with fourteen and fifteen year olds as superior officers.

"And Ellie Potter is like this too, then?" Ron said dully, as if he couldn't find the energy to express any sort of emotion other than shock.

"Gladly," Ginny said with a certain awe in his own voice, "I think."

There'd been no envy in her, no regret for what she'd lost and never known, instead at best resignation and otherwise dull contempt, as if she had simply known she would never belong inside Hogwarts' walls. When she had raised her wand, the brother wand, shining like a star in Ollivanders' shop, there'd been none of the wonder that Tom had worn on his face.

Instead it had seemed as if she'd expected nothing less of herself.

That shining, overwhelming confidence in her own abilities, no matter her circumstances.

"No, I'm sure it's not like that," Hermione said to herself reassuringly, "We'll talk to her, and we'll see, I'm sure it's not like that."

Because an army of wizards, Tom thought to himself, would surely be darker and more terrifying than any mere dark lord. Magic, in Britain, was not meant to be put to military use. It was how Voldemort had so easily come close to winning. The best Britain had had was the corrupted auror corps and a guerilla resistance group formed of barely graduated school children.

Of course, he highly doubted the golden trio would appreciate that, or shinobi for that matter.

In the air, he wondered if they too caught the scent of metaphorical bridges burning.

 

* * *

 

 

"Dead Last," Lee said to her current only sane companion, "We clearly got ripped off with the course selection thing."

Dead Last, eyes still glued to whatever the hell it was they were looking at, didn't say anything. Lee was going to take his silence as adamant agreement.

Now, maybe Minato and Kushina were having the worst time ever being nerds in British fuinjutsu, or Ancient Runes as the wizards decided to call it, but somehow Lee thought they were likely having a far better time than Lee was currently having.

It was cold, that brisk November chill permeating the air, they were outside, and they were staring at what looked like three-foot long love children of a scorpion and lobster that had two barbed tails, no face, and was currently on fire. Bred, of course, not to lob at one's enemies and watch as they writhed in pain while it ate their face, but instead for the sheer entertainment of the wizard civilian masses.

Because apparently, this was what wizards did in their free time.

Lee simply did not understand these people.

"Why did I have to end up in the course with giant, man-eating, fire breathing insects?" Dead Last asked in existential despair.

"Because the former hokages apparently hate us," Lee said, because she was going to go ahead and blame them for sticking her in whatever the hell this was.

Oh, right, Care of Magical Creatures.

Now, she supposed she could see some clan or another taking these things and making them into some kind of nin-scorpion of death, but then it wouldn't be Care of Magical Creatures so much as the usual shinobi How Do I Bond with My Lethal Animal Friends to Kill and or Spy on My Enemies?

And if that was the case, there was no way in hell that someone would be showing off how not to get eaten alive by the fire lobsters to anyone outside the clan. You didn't see the Inuzuka going around blabbing about how exactly they had bred their ferocious canine companions over the course of centuries.

Then again, you didn't see any clan in Konoha handing out instructions for fuinjutsu like free candy either.

And even then, you wouldn't go proudly naming whatever the hell these monstrosities were "Blast-Ended Skrewts". Because first, what the hell was a skrewt, and second, why was Lee unenthused about the fact that it blasted fire from both directions?

Yet here they all were, Dead Last, Lee, and the rest of the unfortunate fourth year fourteen and fifteen-year-old Hogwarts populations, circling a pit of three-foot-long death scorpions while the lumbering bastard who apparently bred the damned things beamed at them like he couldn't be prouder.

And weren't they just adorable?

They should have skipped today too.

A thought suddenly struck Lee. She glanced at Dead Last, gauging his expression. "You don't suppose that this is the assassination attempt, do you?"

Lee had been expecting it all morning, especially now that Team Konoha had officially moved out of the castle. Whoever wanted to strike at her now had far fewer opportunities to do so, especially with Lee vulnerable and sleeping.

Now, creating an entire class devoted to assassinating one's enemies seemed a bit like overkill. On the other hand, though, it was absurdly clever. No one would ever suspect that Eru Lee's unfortunate end being eaten alive by giant lobsters was a deliberate and calculated plan on the part of the shinobi British government.

Well, except for Lee.

"Then why am I here?" Dead Last asked her, still keeping his eye on the scorpion and making sure to edge backwards out of the range of both its tails and fire.

"Collateral damage."

The man, who honestly was the size of three Jiraiyas at least, kept going on in a brogue that Lee could barely understand. Lee glanced again at Dead Last, who was looking less enthused by the second. "Why is he still talking? Are we just staring at them, or are we supposed to do something about all of them?"

And Lee really meant them, as it wasn't just one or two, but a whole wriggling, burning, pit of doom filled with at least a dozen of the things with, apparently, several more elsewhere. What did one call a horde of blast-ended skrewts? Lee was willing to place money on it being a murder.

"How would I know?" Dead Last asked, "You're the one who's the native speaker!"

"He has a very thick accent," Lee defended herself, "He also just keeps on going, and really seems to love the damned things. I think because they're lethal, like that's very much the appeal for him."

Maybe there were shinobi in Britain after all. Lee hadn't thought so, but this guy would be right at home in a hidden village performing genetic experiments on the local wildlife to breed monsters to then send out to crush the enemy.

She just didn't know why they'd stuck him in the academy instead.

Lee forced herself to focus as it appeared that, finally, they were about to do something. Then she blanched. "Oh no."

"Oh no?"

"I think we're supposed to… take care of them?" Lee said as, yes, broken up into pairs each group was now going to take care of their respective creature.

She spotted blonde Malfoy grimacing and teaming up with one of his hulking bodyguards, while Weasley teamed up with that mousey fat boy he always seemed to hang around. Which left Lee and Dead Last to their own cluster of death scorpions. No, not cluster, murder of death scorpions.

"Take care of them?!" Dead Last asked, whipping his head around to watch as a pair of yellow-tied Hogwarts students threw piles of meat at the things, as if in offering to some dread god. At least they looked as unenthused and horrified as Lee felt.

Maybe this was what Britain did, they just threw their poor defenseless genin at the most horrifying person they could think of and let them sink or swim. Like if Konoha had made it a point of throwing children at Orochimaru and seeing which ones came back alive.

Lee heard as Malfoy, cringing, remarked to his partner, " _I can certainly see why we're trying to keep them alive. Who wouldn't want pets that can burn, sting, and bite all at once?"_

"Oh my god," Lee said as she looked down at their truly hideous charges, "They're eating each other."

They really were, some instead of stingers had elongated suckers and appeared to be drinking the blood of their hapless brethren, while others were repeatedly jabbing stingers and breathing fire onto one another.

"Somehow," Lee concluded, "That makes me feel better about this."

Dead Last just turned to look at her.

"If they eat each other then we don't have to deal with them."

"That sounds wrong," Dead Last finally settled on.

And it did, Lee wasn't going to argue with that, but she really wasn't understanding the point of this class.

"Wait a minute," Lee said, eyes growing wide, "Oh my god, I get it, Dead Last."

"Get what?" he asked, edging back once again from their scorpions.

"It's the chunin exams!" She slapped at her forehead, wondering how she could have been so stupid.

"It's the what?"

"The point isn't to take care of them," Lee said, motioning to the ferocious them in question.

"It's not?"

"No, look at them, they're hideous, vicious, and clearly deserve unmitigated death! That's simply what we're told the task is. Clearly, the first part of this assignment is to avoid death at their tails and… suckers."

"I'd gotten that," Dead Last hissed back, clearly unimpressed, and having more gumption than usual.

"So, what are we graded on, then?" Lee asked, motioning to their charges, "Clearly not taking care of these damn things. No, taking care of the others."

She nodded to where Ron Weasley, with a grimace, had flung himself just out of the way of the suckers.

Dead Last balked, slow on the uptake as usual. "That's just—"

"No, Dead Last," Lee said, summoning a kunai from the great abyss of nothing and into her hand, "I mean, subtly, taking care of the others."

If theirs were the last scorpions standing, then clearly, they had outperformed their peers which was the true and measurable outcome of this task. It wasn't about taking care of the things, but surreptitiously destroying the competition.

She had to hand it to this guy, she really hadn't seen this coming, especially not from the academy.

Dead Last opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again. "That actually makes a terrible kind of sense."

"Dead Last, my useless friend," Lee said with a grin and slapping him on the shoulder, "You and I have this course in the bag."

And without any hand seal, without any kunai, she promptly and surreptitiously caused every Blast-Ended Skrewt to explode.

She just unfortunately hadn't realized quite how inflammable the things would be, or that, apparently, they really were supposed to be keeping the monstrosities alive.

 

* * *

 

 

Ancient Runes, the English brand of fuinjutsu, was actually a course Minato had very much been looking forward to.

He couldn't truly say that tinctures held his interest, or the art of dealing with chakra infused plant life, but fuinjutsu had always been near and dear to his heart ever since Jiraiya-sensei had started him on more than the basics.

That said, the English had a very odd way of doing it.

Fuinjutsu, in the elemental nations, was as much an art as it was a science. That was part of the reason it was considered so difficult; there was no direct way to do it, no true way to mass produce anything more than your more basic explosive seal. Real, true works of art via fuinjutsu would differ from one seal master to the next, and required layers upon layers of interwoven seals.

The English, on the other hand, had transcribed clear definitions in English for each of the small array of symbols used. The writing of a seal, then, at least at this level, appeared to be little more than translating one's desire from English into the various seals.

It probably differed at more advanced levels, Minato thought. This was probably just how they started the basics. Except this was apparently the second year in the curriculum, and their current assignment was to create a protective physical ward from a set of very clearly defined symbols with very clearly defined rules.

Maybe it was just Minato, but fuinjutsu wasn't supposed to be this… easy.

Uzumaki looked bored out of her mind.

Like Minato, her runes were already inscribed on the paper, chakra infused into the ink, and her protective seal approved by the professor. Uzumaki had taken at first to flipping through her textbook, and then forgoing that to napping and using the book as a pillow. Minato, for his own part, twirled his wand in his fingers, wondering again how on earth it worked.

Chakra flowed easily through the wood, remarkably so. On waving it in the store there hadn't been an ounce of resistance as his chakra moved through the wood and translated somehow into brilliant light and sparks.

Just through a swish and a flick, and no thought on his own part at all, and there had been the kind of light that only certain types of lightning or fire jutsus could create.

And wizards used it for everything. They didn't seem hampered or even aware of their own elemental types, and were able to do countless jutsus, which to Minato had never seemed possible through hand seals.

Someone tapped on his shoulder, and Minato turned to find Granger Hermione looking at him with an apologetic smile. "Sorry, Minato, I just noticed that you looked like you were finished and thought maybe we could talk. I'm done too."

She proudly displayed her own worksheet, which featured, Minato noticed with a small amount of irritation, much better-drawn runes than his own functioning scribbles. He supposed calligraphy wasn't really the point of fuinjutsu. Still though, he didn't feel right that hers looked prettier than his.

"Sure," Minato said, elbowing Kushina roughly while he was at it, " _Uzumaki, wake up._ "

Kushina bolted upright, red hair in utter disarray, and rubbed at her eyes. " _I'm up, I'm up, believe it!_ "

Then, blinking blearily with violet eyes, she seemed to realize class wasn't over. She pouted over at Minato, glared as best as she was able, and asked, " _The hell, Namikaze?_ "

Minato just pointed in turn to the sheepish looking Hermione, who said in rather prim English, "You really shouldn't be sleeping during class anyway."

"Right," Kushina responded dully, looking very unimpressed with that logic.

Minato just motioned politely for Granger to continue with whatever her question was. There was something, Minato thought, inherently civilian about her despite her chakra and apparent competence with English fuinjutsu. Something about the way she held herself, the fact that her hair was so large and flying out in every direction, or maybe it was just her smile as she looked across at them.

"Right, well, first I guess I wanted to ask why you moved out of the Gryffindor Tower," she said, looking as if she was slightly chagrined for having to ask this but not really regretting doing so either.

"We never should have been in there to start with," Uzumaki blurted without an ounce of shame.

"What do you mean?" Hermione asked, looking slightly offended as well as a tad concerned, "Beauxbatons is currently housed in the Ravenclaw Tower."

"Good for them," Kushina said with an indelicate snort and absolutely no sympathy or tact whatsoever.

Honestly, Minato had to do everything himself. "What Uzumaki means to say is that, given the circumstances of Lee's arrival, it wouldn't be wise to house ourselves anywhere so unfamiliar."

"Her arrival?" Hermione prompted.

"Being summoned out of nowhere and having her _chakra_ conveniently bound by a foreign nation," Uzumaki clarified, "That screams either assassination or kidnapping, believe it."

"You really think so?" Hermione asked, and then with a barely disguised sly glint in her eye she asked, "Does that happen often in _Konoha_?"

"No," Minato said simply, if only because no other hidden village thought they could get away with anything that brazenly ridiculous. Especially now, such an action, were it possible, would undoubtedly trigger a third war.

Still, that didn't help his sudden, sinking suspicion that Granger Hermione was digging for something. Information, or else confirmation to some unknown theory.

"Oh," she said simply, "Well, that's good I suppose."

She shifted uncomfortably in her seat while Minato and Kushina waited for whatever her next, eager question was.

Finally, she came out with it, "So, what's _Konoha_ like?"

"Very different," Minato said shortly and politely, as really he didn't even know where to start with that one. Somehow he felt that Konoha would be as baffling to her as England was proving to be to him.

"Really?" Hermione asked, "Are you still in school then?"

"No," Uzumaki responded, "Blondie and I have been out of the academy for ages. Both _chunin_ for that matter, and I personally am soon to be a _jonin_."

Oh, she just had to get that dig in, didn't she? Minato really couldn't help but roll his eyes.

"What does that mean?"

"It means that Uzumaki, Lee, and I are…" Minato trailed off, trying to think of the best way to put it, "Ranking officers."

"So, you are in the military then?" Hermione said, and there it was, the confirmation she'd been digging for but hoped she wouldn't hear, "Ginny told us yesterday."

"Military?" Uzumaki asked, clearly thinking of the civilian troops of the various elemental nations rather than shinobi forces, "I guess so."

Military was not something that Konoha or any other hidden village would call itself, even if that's what Britain saw.

"Everyone, Granger," Minato clarified, "That is a part of _Konoha's_ _shinobi_ corps is part of the military."

"Everyone?!" Granger's eyes grew to the size of saucers, "That's horrible!"

Uzumaki just shrugged, having clearly not thought about it much given that her destiny as a shinobi was all too likely written from her birth. "It is what it is."

Though, Minato too could hardly imagine life as a civilian, no matter that he had come from civilian roots.

"But wait, you mean muggleborns are brought into the military?!" Granger asked, pointing an accusing finger at them.

"Well," Kushina said with raised eyebrows, "Usually kids from civilian families just don't have the _chakra_ to cut it as a _shinobi_ , Namikaze here excluded. Sure, you get them in the academy, but a lot end up dropping out or going to the _genin_ corps."

That, apparently, was the wrong thing to say.

"Excuse me?"

Granger's chakra flared, unrefined killing intent rose as her face flushed, and she tightly gripped her wand as she asked through gritted teeth, "What did you just say?"

"Um," Uzumaki said blinking before repeating hesitantly, "Civilian kids don't usually have as much _chakra_?"

It was true, chakra was genetic. It was the upper advantage along with prior training, blood limits, and hoarded knowledge that the clans held. Every once in a while you'd get someone without a clan who had enough chakra, but it wasn't nearly as often and was a relatively rare event. Minato was well aware that there were not many Namikaze Minatos in the world.

"How dare you," Granger said, "I should have realized, when Ginny talked to us, that it'd be the same there as it is here. Worse, even."

"Realized what?" Uzumaki asked, looking truly confused, and Minato was right there with her.

"And let me guess, Ellie Potter believes all this too, doesn't she?"

"Yes?" Minato supplied, with extreme hesitation, because it wasn't so much a belief as it just was. For god's sake, anyone could sense the difference, or just see the difference between clans and civilian-born shinobi as a whole. It was simple common knowledge.

"Right, then," Granger said, packing her things as the bell rang, "I'm afraid I've misjudged you, Namikaze, Uzumaki."

And then she was gone, stomping out of the room and leaving Minato and Kushina to stare after her in blinking confusion.

Kushina turned to look at him, asking, "Was it something I said?"

 

* * *

 

 

At the end of the day, Lee found herself sitting with Minato outside of the shodaime's newly built deluxe sealed cabin, which was large enough to fit all of Team Konoha and their supplies inside.

They leaned against the wooden walls, watching the sun glittering across the lake.

Finally, dully, Lee admitted the event that had been haunting her all day, even when she'd gone to her next class of trying to see her future demise in tea leaves. "So, I set my entire class on fire today."

"I think I just outed myself and Uzumaki as racists," Minato said in an equally dull tone.

He looked a bit stunned as well, blue eyes reflecting the light but little else as Lee turned to look at him. At least, Lee thought, he really did have an equally bad time in his classes.

"So, you blew it too?" Lee asked and he just nodded.

Funny, she'd thought that was her job. Minato was normally so good with people. She couldn't really picture a world in which Minato's social faux pas left him universally hated.

"Well," Lee said as she leaned against him, "This place blows."

"Well," Minato said with the faintest of smiles, "Whatever this place is, I'm glad about one thing."

"What's that?" Lee asked.

He just grinned. "Team seven, the two of us, are back together again."

He'd said as much before, said it with that same smile when they were on Konoha's soil no less, but somehow it seemed to mean more just now than it had even then. It really had been some time, years even, since they'd been anywhere like this.

And she'd forgotten, yesterday, or hadn't managed to find the time between Weasel Tequila, luck potions, and relocating to their new headquarters in a foreign land.

So, before she could forget, or else lose her nerve, Lee, in a similar manner to how she had with Tequila yesterday, brushed her lips against his.

And it, perhaps, wasn't so terrible after all.


	33. Clash of the Cultures

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Brought to you early in prat by frootloopygrrl on tumblr.
> 
> Thanks to GlassGirlCeci on fanfiction for betaing the chapter.

_In which Konoha begins to reap what it sowed, Dead Last is given the shocking opportunity to prove that he's not dead last somewhere, and the former kages have another meeting with the headmaster._

* * *

 

Now, Kushina normally made it a point not to stare at Namikaze Minato, but this morning she just couldn't help herself. Because something had clearly gone very wrong with her pretty blonde rival, and Kushina had no idea what the hell it was.

He was just staring into space again, almost dreamily, as they walked towards the Great Hall. Like even though his body was here, his mind was off somewhere else entirely. And every once in a while a pale, faint blush would cross over his cheeks.

And he'd been so dazed he'd almost tripped over his own feet twice now.

"Okay," Kushina said slowly, "Namikaze, you're really weirding me out today."

Namikaze Minato gave no indication of having heard her at all, just as he'd been barely functioning the night before too. Really, he'd been like this ever since they'd gone back to camp Konoha out behind the castle.

"Namikaze," Kushina prompted, waving her hand in front of his vacant eyes, "Earth to Namikaze! Hey, idiot, can you even hear me right now?"

This last question was screamed loud enough that the hall could hear, and was accompanied by all the English students walking to breakfast staring at Kushina like she was a crazy person (but hey, Kushina got shit done). Still, Uzumaki volume appeared to work, as Minato was snapping back to reality.

"What was that for?" he asked, like he'd been doing something very important before Kushina had shouted in his face.

"You were turning into a zombie," Kushina said, "I just cured you, believe it."

"I was not turning into a zombie," Minato said, now looking offended and huffy as well as embarrassed. Which, good, at least he knew he'd been acting like a spacey moron for the last twelve hours.

"Well, you have been kind of inattentive," Dead Last hedged before withering beneath Minato's glare.

"Dead Last here is right," Kushina said with a grin, "You've been out to lunch since yesterday."

Minato shrugged like he had no idea what Kushina was on about, flushed again, and desperately looked to his left, in the exact opposite direction to where Lee was walking next to him in her typical pre-breakfast stupor.

Kushina felt something in her stomach drop.

Now, it could just be her imagination—Minato had always been weirdly close to and just weird about Lee in general, but this was different than usual. Minato wasn't very easy to distract, especially for long periods of time, and something about Lee seemed to be really distracting him today.

Which meant that something with Lee had changed when Kushina wasn't looking.

And Kushina really did not like the sound of that.

Finally, they reached the Hogwarts English cafeteria and made their way to the red and gold Gryffindor table. Only, before they could reach it, they found themselves cut off by Granger Hermione and friends.

Kushina hadn't been in England long, and in Gryffindor even less than that, but she'd gotten the feeling that Granger Hermione, Weasley Ron, and Longbottom Neville were in some sort of inner-circle of the dormitory. Sure, others were there, but those were the three that made lasting decisions and had lasting impacts that would ripple out into the school itself.

" _Where do you think you're going?_ " Granger asked in a particularly accusing manner, as if she knew exactly where they thought they were heading and wasn't going to stand for it.

" _Breakfast?_ " Lee asked, eyebrows raised and pointing towards the overzealous breakfast spread, looking just as perplexed as Kushina felt.

Well, strike that. Kushina had been there for that last conversation with Granger (one that apparently still was bothering her), so at least Kushina had been there when things had gone down.

" _Seriously?_ " Kushina couldn't help asking, but this seemed to just make it worse. Now, Kushina knew she wasn't the best with people, could be a bit abrasive at times—not to mention her obnoxious verbal tic—but she hadn't thought she'd messed it up this bad.

" _Seriously, you lot left Gryffindor,_ " Weasley Ron spat out, and then pointed across the hall to the Slytherin table, " _And given the rubbish you all believe in, you should park yourselves right over there with the bloody snakes._ "

" _What I believe in?_ " Lee asked, looking even more alarmed and confused than before.

" _Blood puritism,_ " Longbottom said quietly but with a seriousness that said he more than supported his friends' decision, " _Hermione told us about it yesterday._ "

Lee grimaced, clearly confused but trying to look like she knew what was happening or else decide if reality was just malfunctioning again. " _And what is the blood puritism that I believe in?_ "

" _Oh, for God's sake,_ " Granger said under her breath before looking up, glaring, and pointing to Kushina and Minato in turn, " _They said, yesterday, that muggleborns don't have as much magic as purebloods._ "

Kushina could see the gears in Lee's head spinning and failing to gain any traction, clearly caught in the same track that Kushina was in: that this was an obvious, true statement. Sure, sometimes people like Minato came out of civilian families, but it wasn't every day that happened, and the fact was that clans were clans for a reason.

Clans married into clans not just for knowledge and blood limits, but also because chakra was genetic.

That's just how it worked, whether you liked it or not.

" _Well, Minato I suppose has as much_ chakra _as most clan members, I mean, skipping over the Uzumaki powerhouse over here—_ "

" _But you're not denying it,_ " Granger said, cutting her off, eyes practically boring holes into Lee, " _Are you?_ "

Lee said nothing for a very long time, a damnably long time, and then pointed to the table, " _Can I just grab a few slices of toast?_ "

It was very clear that the answer to that, at least from this disgusted end of the Gryffindor table, was no. The four Konoha shinobi, now apparently table-less, looked at one another.

The shodaime and nidaime were out and about wandering the Forbidden Forest, which sounded like barrels of not-fun and unlikely to give them any breakfast. Which meant that for today, at least, they were stuck in the Great Hall.

Besides, they had to eat lunch and dinner in here too, so they'd have to find a new spot to sit in eventually if the Gryffindor table was out.

Dead Last blinked at all of them. "I think I got a little lost in there. Did we just get thrown out of the table?"

"We're too racist for _Gryffindor_ ," Kushina said blandly, "Believe it."

"I believe it," Minato said, "I'm just not sure why. Any sensor would tell them the same thing. Hell, any sensor could tell them how much chakra each and every one of them had. It's a non-issue."

"Have you seen the nidaime recently?" Kushina asked, nodding to the enchanted walls practically bleeding with chakra and fuinjutsu, "They've made this place so loud he almost has epileptic fits every time he steps inside here. Their sensors aren't going to pick up anything in here, if they can even make it into the building without vomiting their eyes out."

"Well, we could take them up on the _Slytherin_ table," Lee noted, nodding her head towards the green and silver table, whose occupants were looking oddly joyous per the occasion. Probably because anything that caused Gryffindor, or its central nervous system, grief was something to be cheered on.

Sage, even the good old Hyuga and Uchiha rivalry hadn't felt this ridiculous, for all that they loathed each other.

Minato glared over at the table, eyes landing on the particularly smug-looking Malfoy, and said, "Let's not."

He then looked over at Lee, flushing for a moment then smiling fondly. "Lee, why don't we just make our own table?"

"Oh, right," Lee said, eyes wide and flushing in turn, "Why didn't I think of that?"

With only that word, another table was appearing out of nothingness in a corner of the room, large enough for the four of them with Konoha's green leaf emblem dangling from a banner over top of it.

Lee then summoned food from various tables as they made their way over and sat down.

Lee shoved a piece of toast in her mouth and nodded towards Minato. "Great idea, Minato, I don't know if I would have thought of this."

Minato flushed, looking a little overly pleased and nervous at Lee's casual praise. "Oh, I'm sure you would have thought of it eventually."

Kushina pointed between them, eyes narrowing. "What is this?"

"What is what?" Minato said, starting, which meant he knew exactly what was up and was praying to god Kushina wouldn't narrow in on whatever it was. But no, not just that, there was an edge of triumph in his expression too, like he'd just won some victory that Kushina could never take from him.

"This," Kushina said coldly, letting some of her irritation and anger leak through her chakra, but Namikaze was never one to quail before a threat of power and just raised one pale eyebrow in askance.

As if to say, come at me, Uzumaki.

And oh, Kushina would, give her two seconds and a sparring ring, and his ass was—

" _Well, Eru, you do know how to stir up a crowd._ " Weasley Ginny, maybe Kushina's least favorite person in this school, casually sat down at the table across from Lee, forcing Dead Last to scoot over and make room.

" _Tequila,_ " Lee said dully as she prepared another slice of toast, " _What a pleasant surprise. Shouldn't you be over at the Gryffindor table?_ "

Ginny smiled thinly, politely, and said, " _Oh no, I'm afraid I find it far more interesting over here._ "

Kushina bet she did, and as she had before, this one little girl put her more on edge than the rest of Gryffindor combined. Something about her, about her chakra and even her smile, seemed far more of a serious threat.

As though Weasley Ginny weren't really a Hogwarts student at all, not like the rest of them.

" _Your brothers don't look pleased,_ " Minato noted, for once appearing on the same side as Kushina, because apparently the enemy of my enemy was my friend in this case.

" _Brother,_ " Ginny corrected, nodding her head towards the older twin red-heads who were looking curiously at their new and improved table, " _Fred and George are waiting to see where this lands. They're not quite as willing as dear Ron to jump the wand, so to speak._ "

" _But isn't your brother's bad opinion worth something?_ " Minato pushed, but Ginny just shook her head ruefully.

" _Not as much as he thinks it is,_ " Ginny said, " _Besides, he'll realize sooner or later that it's better to have me keeping an eye on you four than no one at all._ "

Ginny grabbed a piece of toast from the table, inspecting it casually, and just as casually remarked, " _Still, you really do have no idea what you've just done, do you?_ "

Dead Last edged towards Kushina, leaning over to ask her, "Uzumaki, can you break this down for me, she's talking a little fast and—"

Kushina brushed him off, instead leaning forward to get a better look at the girl. " _What we've done?_ "

" _You've gone and picked your sides, in the course of only a few days,_ " Ginny explained, with an arrogant and rather smug smile across her face, " _You're beginning to reap what you've sown._ "

" _Could you say that any more cryptically?_ " Kushina asked in utter exasperation.

" _Britain, for the past fifty years, century really, has been divided into two camps. The first is that of the old aristocracy, I believe you've called them clans. Among other things, they hold a very strong belief that children born to muggles, civilians, are inferior in terms of magical ability. Some are even of the opinion that they should be denied entrance to Hogwarts and our society writ large. The others are those that believe there is no inherent difference between the abilities of muggleborns and the rest of the populace, and that those who hold to such beliefs have outlived their time. You have unequivocally placed yourself in the first camp._ "

Ginny smiled cheerfully, her eyes twinkling with mirth. " _Congratulations._ "

" _Can't you tell for yourselves?_ " Minato asked.

" _Tell what?_ " Ginny asked in turn, eyebrows raised.

" _How much_ chakra _, magic, a person does or does not have,_ " Minato explained, motioning towards Ginny, " _Any competent sensor, or even a mediocre one, can give you a rough estimate. It's not a matter of debate._ "

Ginny went very still and very quiet, and at once she did not look like a thirteen-year-old girl but someone far older. " _You can do that?_ "

Lee nodded, as if she didn't notice the sudden chill in the air, the change in chakra. " _Any of us besides Dead Last here can give you at least a rough estimate._ "

" _That's very interesting,_ " Ginny remarked, sounding as if it wasn't interesting at all, and quickly became very quiet and lost in her own thoughts.

"Well, I suppose it is what it is," Lee said, switching back to Kushina's native tongue with an easy smile, this one directed towards Minato and Minato alone.

And suddenly, Kushina was feeling a bit like a third wheel.

"You make it sound so easy," Minato said, but he was smiling again, looking like there was no one in the world that wasn't named Minato or Lee.

Oh no.

"Well, easy or not, we probably would have ended up here eventually," Lee said with a shrug, "I for one, am glad we got it out of the way in our first week."

Oh hell no.

"Really?" Minato asked, "Because usually you like to get it out of the way in the first day."

"Well, I had to reserve that for the getting lucky potions."

"And the fire lobsters."

"No, those were day number two."

This was flirting. Not even just dance-around-the-subject quasi-flirting that Minato and Lee constantly engaged in, but straight up slapping-you-in-the-face flirting. Not just from one or the other either, but the pair of them, doing the verbal spar as old as time itself.

Kushina was not having it.

And, oddly enough, as Kushina glanced towards the other sane occupants of the table, neither was Weasel Tequila.

 

* * *

 

 

Minato, earlier in the week, had been looking forward to Defense Against the Dark Arts class, as it seemed like the course that most closely related to what Konoha had spent years in the academy teaching. Namely, how to battle and disarm your opponent.

He'd wondered, reading through textbooks and entering this strange glittering world, what it was the English thought battle was.

What would their stances look like? Would they truly only focus on self-defense from the strange lethal beasts that might await the common wizard or witch on the open road, or how to defend against enemy nin? Was theirs a world where they believed enemy shinobi were a threat?

The English shinobi had always implied this was the case, that he and his comrades were considered missing nin, but…

They did and they did not.

They acknowledged there were wizards, trained just as they were, who intended them and their people great harm, but seemed to refuse to deal with it. As if simply by ignoring the threat and turning their collective back on it, then it would disappear.

Or that the likes of Lee would miraculously appear from the ether to dismantle the threat for them.

Which, in their defense, she had reappeared from Konoha. The only trouble was that Minato didn't think they realized that Lee had no intentions towards her mother country at all. Well, perhaps after yesterday they were starting to.

Of course, that had been a few days ago, yesterday even. Before Minato's world had gotten flipped upside down because his best friend had kissed him across the lips and then gone inside as if nothing had happened.

Well, it wasn't as if it was out of nowhere. Being on the road with Jiraiya had opened his eyes to certain opportunities he hadn't considered before, but Minato also hadn't done anything one way or another. He'd had thoughts, here and there on the road out of sight, but then they'd finally been back in Konoha and they were on a mission.

Missions weren't the time and place for this sort of thing.

So, Minato had stuffed whatever vague plans and ambitions he'd had inside of a box labeled "Deal with when in Konoha", and had considered that that.

But Lee, apparently, hadn't, and so now the box was open and exploding everywhere and Minato couldn't think.

Normally, Minato was very fond of thinking, and while he'd be rather put out if he was too distracted to function, he wasn't that upset. Because this was a good thing; he'd had feelings for a while, certainly since travelling to parts unknown with Jiraiya-sensei, and now he knew that Lee had feelings too.

Except god, were her feelings and his feelings, and her kissing him across the lips distracting.

Especially since he hadn't seen it coming.

Well, sure, he'd imagined it every now and then (and quite a bit else along with that) but he hadn't actually expected it to happen. Certainly, he hadn't thought it would be in England of all places, right after a day that was an unmitigated failure.

Maybe Minato was romantic, but he'd expected to be back home in Konoha, maybe they'd have dinner somewhere nicer than the local ramen joint, and they'd go onto that little red bridge over the river at night and…

Not that he was upset, he wasn't at all, just…

Just, he didn't know what to do! It all seemed both too fast and too slow all at once. Like something should have happened at breakfast (although lord, Uzumaki was at breakfast, along with that Weasel English girl. No, breakfast was not the time and place) or else should be happening now.

Except right now he was sitting in Defense Against the Dark Arts, and he needed to focus and not think about the moment her lips had touched his. First that moment of shock, then a stinging, buzzing sort of electricity on contact, and how her lips had felt soft even while chapped—

Uzumaki jabbed him in the ribs.

"Thank you, Uzumaki," Minato said with a small, grateful smile as he rubbed at his ribs.

Uzumaki spared him a small, unsympathetic glance. "Try to keep it in your pants, lover boy."

Well, it seemed Uzumaki really wasn't as dim as she acted half the time. What joy.

With a sigh, Minato forced himself to focus on the room. It was a Gryffindor-Slytherin class yet again, this one taught by that odd peg-legged one-eyed man who seemed more kin to shinobi than anyone else in this place. The class, as in Potions, was segregated, with Gryffindor on one side of the room and Slytherin on the other and no love lost between them.

Konoha, given what had happened this morning, was stuck awkwardly in the middle towards the back, belonging to neither one group nor the other.

And the man seemed to be of Minato's opinion when it came to the dangers of enemy ninja as opposed to wild beasts. " _You see this leg? You see this eye? This is the work of dark wizards. Don't let the ministry-approved bullshit fool you, there are wizards out there who'd like nothing more than to take your eyes out._ "

The man pointed at Malfoy with his wand, who had been snickering quietly but paled at the sight of the wood. " _You, boy, you think it's funny do you?_ "

" _No, sir,_ " Malfoy said, trying and failing to smother his smirk.

Minato would bet his own right hand that Malfoy was about to be made an example of.

" _You think it'd never happen to the likes of you,_ " the professor—Moody, if Minato was remembering correctly—sneered, " _Because you're a Malfoy. I've got news for you, Malfoy. Dark wizards turn on each other all the time. They eat each other. They'd eat the likes of you and still have room for seconds. Constant vigilance applies to us all._ "

Malfoy opened his mouth, closed it, looked to his stunned peers, and then blurted, " _My father—_ "

" _Your father isn't in this class, is he, Ferret?_ " Moody asked, causing a good chunk of Gryffindor, including Weasley Ron, to burst into stifled laughter.

"Wait, did he just say that Malfoy didn't think anyone would target him because he belongs to a clan?" Haru asked, tilting his head and clearly focusing on what he could grasp of the conversation. Which, in this case, was a fair amount.

"It seems so," Minato quietly said back, "But I don't think the _English_ clans are quite like ours."

After all, in Konoha, clans were far warier of attack, kidnapping, and infiltration than someone like Minato, who had come from nowhere with no exciting blood limits to his name. The Uchiha would be far warier of enemy villages, of missing nin, than someone without a prestigious clan name.

In their world, Malfoy, more than anyone else, would know the dangers that followed his name.

"No, I don't even get this, should everyone be wary of enemy nin—" Haru said, unfortunately a bit too loudly as Moody's rolling glass eye (pulsing with chakra and fuinjutsu) landed on him.

" _You, Other Ferret, you have something to say?_ "

" _Ah, no, Professor,_ " Haru managed to stammer out in embarrassment and horror at his own relatively thick accent.

" _No, no this is good. I think today's as good as any for a demonstration,_ " Moody said with a jagged grin, " _Ferret, Ferret Two, it's time you learned something about constant vigilance and the wisdom of keeping your mouths shut._ "

With a gnarled, scarred hand, Moody motioned towards the center of the classroom. Swishing his wand and muttering foreign words, he cleared it of the desk and chalkboard that had sat there, leaving a circle free for sparring.

Malfoy and Haru looked over at one another, sizing each other up uncomfortably, neither quite able to get a read on what the other might be capable of.

Lee slapped a hand on Haru's shoulder. "You can win this, Dead Last."

"Have I ever won anything?" Haru wondered in dazed horror.

"You won that one fight in the chunin exams," Uzumaki pointed out, putting her hand on his other shoulder.

"He surrendered," Haru responded, clearly remembering that fight all too well.

"Lose," Lee began, eyes glowing in that way her eyes sometimes did, "And you bring Konohagakure an eternity of dishonor.”

" _Sometime today, brats!_ " Moody called out, motioning for both Malfoy and Haru to join him. Upon seeing Haru's hesitation, Malfoy grew more confident, smug even, as if Haru's lack of confidence spelled his victory for him.

Perhaps it did, or perhaps he'd just given Haru the key to victory. As Haru sighed and made to move down into the ring, Minato whispered to him, "Haru, these are not shinobi."

Haru looked confused, even as he walked down towards the center, but he would understand it soon enough. Malfoy might have confidence, Malfoy might even be good for whatever these people considered good, but they had only one course in their curriculum on combat.

These were not people bred for war.

Even Konoha's dead last would be better suited to combat than that.

" _Now, when I give the signal, I want you to beat the ever-loving shit out of each other in any way you want,_ " Moody said. He stepped back, raising his arm as he did so and looking both at Malfoy and Haru.

" _What about our ten paces?_ " Malfoy asked.

" _To hell with your ten paces, Ferret, this is war,_ " Moody spat back, " _The dark lord isn't going to give a flying shit about your ten paces._ "

Finally, Moody was out of the ring and in the seats among the students. He lowered his arm and yelled, " _Start!_ "

Malfoy raised his wand, began to move it in a series of swishes and flicks, started pronouncing syllables, but before he could get through the motions, Dead Last was on him, knocking the wand out of his grasp as he might an enemy's kunai, then jabbing Malfoy in the face, knocking him out in one clean motion.

A perfect reproduction of a basic series of kata.

"Did he just kick the Ferret's ass with basic kata?" Uzumaki asked, as if she couldn't believe what she'd just seen.

Malfoy didn't move, didn't even twitch.

Minato opened his mouth, closed it, trying to think of something to say but finding that words were positively failing him.

Even Haru looked as if he didn't quite know what the hell had just happened.

Finally, it was Lee who noted in amazement, "Well, it looks like even something like dead last is relative."

 

* * *

 

 

Tobirama and his brother sat in the headmaster's office once again, summoned there after breakfast had ended and the pair had returned from England's answer to the forest of death (filled with temperamental centaurs, oversized spiders, and god only knew what else). Naturally, Hashirama had loved the damn place and the trees that seemed to nefariously ooze chakra.

Tobirama could honestly say he hated this office almost as much as he hated that forest.

It seemed he would never grow used to this, the saturation of chakra in every available surface. His only respite available was in an over-sealed cabin built by his brother or else in the civilian neighborhood of Lee's Surrey. Every time he closed his eyes, let his breathing stall, he could almost feel it buzzing inside of his skull.

Meeting with this headmaster, this Dumbledore, was not helping his mood either.

However much Tobirama had suspected something like this would happen. When they'd taken Lee and the others out of the castle, it'd been inevitable that Dumbledore would regroup and speak with them sooner or later.

It turned out to be sooner.

"I feel there is too much we do not know about each other," Dumbledore started, motioning towards the pair of them sitting in the chairs he'd conjured from chakra and dust, "My people and yours."

"You kidnapped one of our shinobi," Tobirama said, rubbing at his temples and in no mood for beating around the bush this morning, not after the dancing around the subject he'd already done in this office the meeting before, "I don't see what else there is to know."

"What my brother means to say—" Hashirama started with an embarrassed grin, but Dumbledore cut him off, apparently far more interested in what Tobirama had to say about all of this.

"Now, you surely don't believe that," Dumbledore said, his eyes twinkling oddly in the light, "Otherwise you would not be here in the castle at all, only allowing the girl to appear when she absolutely had to."

Well, Tobirama would give him that, but couldn't help a smile. "No, it means you simply do not understand our people, or Lee for that matter."

"How so?"

Tobirama spared him a dry glance. "For information, for foreign techniques and instruction, you must realize my people are prepared to risk a great deal. And Lee Eru, your Eleanor Potter, is not so easily kidnapped or assassinated."

"Still," Hashirama interjected over Tobirama, sparing him a pointed look to shut up already, "According to you, someone put her name in that Goblet."

"Ah, yes," Dumbledore said, "Someone, indeed, put Eleanor Lily Potter's name in that Goblet, and knew enough to put her name along with a school not currently represented. I am afraid anyone over the age of seventeen is a suspect."

"Not quite," Tobirama said, "Who above the age of seventeen had something significant to gain from her appearance?"

Who wanted something, blood limits, assassination, from the girl to risk the consequences of her forced appearance?

"Pick a name," Dumbledore scoffed in turn, a rueful smile on his lips, "I am afraid it is you who underestimates just what Eleanor Lily Potter means to this country. Perhaps she was summoned for nefarious gains, as you mention, perhaps someone was merely curious to see her in person and force her back into Hogwarts."

"And if she had not answered the call, or been unable to?" Tobirama asked in turn, and on the old man's face he could read the answer well enough, "Whoever did this did not wish her well."

And the man knew it as well as Tobirama himself did, but had been hoping to gloss it over. As he had been hoping to gloss over their placement in the school, the pointed selection of their schedule, and Lee's earning of detentions which had since then been written off.

They were feeling each other out, Tobirama realized, for intent and weaknesses. Slowly attempting to infiltrate the other before the other could notice how far it had gotten. And so far, Konoha was willing if only because they had a foothold in this country and Dumbledore did not.

"Perhaps not," Dumbledore finally said after a pause, "It is true by reputation alone, Eleanor Lily Potter does not lack for enemies."

"What kinds of enemies?" Hashirama asked.

"Former Death Eaters, mainly," the man said, but too casually, as if there was something unspoken being glossed over, "I assume you've read the books or been told."

"And you believe a disorganized collection of radicalized citizens could organize and infiltrate your academy?" Tobirama asked, and there it was, what Dumbledore had so easily glossed over.

This was not just anyone who had acted, not simply anyone wishing harm against an ideal or else hoping to collect some of her genetic material. It was someone who had had enough access to the academy to be able to enter her name in the Goblet.

Someone who, presumably, would have access to her once she arrived at the school and participated in the tournament.

And thus, likely, someone who was still within the castle walls.

Which left, as far as Tobirama saw it, two groups. The first would be acting on behalf of the English village, the ministry, or Hogwarts, kidnapping the missing Girl-Who-Lived back from the void to be put into English service.

The second possibility was that a shadowy group of missing nin had infiltrated the academy as either students or professors. Which meant not only the resources to pull off this kind of operation, but significant planning as well.

In the first case, Tobirama had realized the night before with some thought, Dumbledore himself was Tobirama's primary and most easily identifiable suspect with very clear motive.

"Regrettably," Dumbledore said rubbing at his own temples in weariness, "It is more than possible."

"That said," he continued, "Now that the girl is here, I believe she should make up for time she's lost in her home country. Growing up in muggle Surrey, I'm afraid she's missed so much of our country. Normally we do not allow students off school grounds, especially without supervision, but if you and your… comrades… would like it, I'll put together little tours of the magical British Isles on the weekends, spent with a staff member and a collection of Hogwarts students."

Well, he was clever, wasn't he?

He knew very well that they would do whatever they wanted or needed to, particularly when class was not in session (as had been shown when Minato, Lee, Kushina, and Haru all left for London to get their wands) but he also knew that Tobirama would not turn down a chance for observation.

Even with cherry-picked students and staff members who were undoubtedly infiltration specialists.

"We'd love it," Hashirama said with his carefree grin, "Lee rarely talks about her home country, and it's so nice to get to see it in person."

"She remembered England, then?" Dumbledore asked, "She disappeared when she was very young."

"Lee has an astounding memory," Tobirama commented. There were others that were similar; he wouldn't doubt if the Hatake boy distinctly remembered being four or five-years-old, but Lee, as with everything, had a tendency to take this to a higher level.

"Anything specifically?"

"She talked quite a bit about living in her uncle's cupboard."

That shut that line of questioning down quite nicely. The man, at least, had the decency to look ashamed. Not alarmed, or altogether surprised, but instead ashamed, as if he had known all along but had considered it a necessity (unfortunate or otherwise) that Lee be housed among her civilian relatives.

Rather than as a ward of the hidden village or stored amongst the protections of its larger and more prominent clans.

Because if Tobirama had been the English kage in the aftermath of that war, even had he been English and lived in their world thinking as they thought, he could not imagine himself doing anything but adopting the girl right then and there and placing her under Senju protection.

And had Tobirama, in that position, done anything less, then undoubtedly some other, different motivation than the safety of the girl and his village would have been at play.


	34. The Worst Spies in London

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to GlassGirlCeci on fanfiction for betaing the chapter. Brought to you early in part by an anonymous fan.

_In which Lee postulates on the nature of England as well as her own talents, Hermione gets the lecture she deserves but wasn't aware she needed, and Konoha is promised a meeting with a very important person._

* * *

 

There were reasons, Lee realized this fine November Saturday morning, that she had not been guided into becoming an infiltration specialist.

Now, the academy was usually thought to be more of a general experience, in that you were taught how to be competent in the Academy Three as well as the general philosophy of what it meant to be a shinobi. That said, Lee did know that the academy paid attention to and encouraged the various talents of their students.

Minato and Uzumaki, for example, had gotten some start on fuinjutsu in the academy (although it seemed like Uzumaki had her fair amount from Uzushio). Lee hadn't really experienced this, but Lee would be honest and say she hadn't really been tuned into the academy.

She may have spent most of it sleeping.

That, and her instructors were probably so fed up with her bullshit abilities that they hadn't necessarily wanted to give her more ammunition. Lee had been easily good enough to become some poor jonin sensei's (read: Jiraiya's) problem.

Point being, nowhere on her journey to chunin (about to become jonin) had anyone sat her down and said, "Alright, Lee, let's talk about infiltration."

Not the academy, not Jiraiya, and not even Sakumo-shishou, who you'd think as an ANBU captain would emphasize things like that. Instead, he seemed to want Lee to be more of a smash and grab exfiltration operative rather than anything undercover.

Lee was not expected to hang about in enemy territory for any significant length of time.

Of course, now that Lee was doing what essentially was infiltration (albeit a very blatant and diplomatic example), she could see just why every single mentor she'd had made a point to avoid it.

It was a cold and dreary British Saturday in November, and instead of doing anything remotely useful, Lee and everybody else were prancing around magical London with Granger Hermione, Weasley Ron and Tequila, Longbottom Neville, as well as some homeless guy who had apparently once been a staff member, Lupin Remus.

Whose chakra, as it stood, looked… Well, wrong was undercutting it, really. If one could have leprosy of the chakra, then that's what he had. He looked like he was seriously ill physically, too, that or that he'd been sleeping under park benches for the last six months and was taking no measures to disguise it.

Lee couldn't help but notice that the nidaime was giving the man an unbelievably wide berth, leaving it to his more affable brother to somehow cut the awkward tension (although, oddly enough, Lupin didn't seem so much offended by the behavior as somewhat resigned to it).

Why were they doing this? The answer was a clear and simple word: information.

It was a blatant, ridiculous attempt at manipulation on the part of the English (although Lee really couldn't tell to what end), but it also likely revealed more of a hand than Dumbledore Albus (who had been oddly eager to put this whole thing together) was probably expecting.

Granted, Lee felt she and the gang had pretty much already done this particular trip when they'd skipped classes to go get the wands, but apparently they were learning something new as they ducked into each and every gaudy little shop in the shopping district.

Lee, for example, was learning exactly how much Granger Hermione disliked the entire lot of them. Not only had she not cooled down in the few days since throwing them out of the Gryffindor table—no, she seemed more resolute in hating them on principle, with Weasley Ron and Longbottom Neville right there beside her.

Which honestly still surprised Lee a little bit.

Granted, Lee hadn't been there at the time, but this just seemed wrong. Minato was so naturally good with people, he always had been, he had that sort of magnetic charisma that you just wanted to be closer to. Lee was the one who always drove them off by the barrelful, and even she hadn't been able to drive off all of Minato's academy friends. The idea that Minato had pulled, well, a Lee was inconceivable. Uzumaki, sure she'd believe that, but Minato?

Point being, even though it was clear that they were supposed to be getting along, the English student trio were quickly proving themselves to be the most incompetent spies Lee had ever heard of. Lee might be frustratingly bad at infiltration (having neither the patience, desire, nor talent for the task), but they were worse, if only because they didn't even seem to realize they were supposed to be spies.

Upon meeting them that morning at the Hogwarts gates, Granger had pointedly made it clear that, "We're only here because Headmaster Dumbledore insisted."

Like their respecting Dumbledore's almighty authority as an overpowered principal who acted like a kage in his spare time was supposed to impress Lee or something.

Either this was a very clever plot to deceive Lee into thinking they were virtually harmless, or they were failing utterly to understand the purpose of their being here.

Then again, Lee thought as she stared at the trio's back as they pointedly hung near Lupin towards the front of their little group, perhaps it was just a sign that they really weren't shinobi and Lee should stop treating them like it.

Hadn't it been Lee, after all, who had been pointing out for years that there weren't shinobi in England?

Well, except when there were. There was the English nin to consider, self-trained and missing nin though he seemed to be. However, if Moody wasn't a battle-hardened crippled English shinobi that the English thought it'd be a great idea to stuff into their academy, then Lee would eat her headband. Not to mention that she was still ninety-percent sure that Hagrid was the English equivalent of Orochimaru, who had also been stuck into the academy for reasons unknown.

Apparently, though Lee never would have guessed it, England was very much of the sink or swim style of training. It wasn't really a philosophy that Konoha ascribed to, though it wasn't uncommon in other villages.

Just… None of the students seemed to realize they were being weeded out through death. Instead you had Granger Hermiones getting all huffy over someone daring to point out that chakra was goddamn genetic. If Lee was Granger, personally, she'd be spending far more of her time doing everything in her power to simply survive the place for seven years.

And being very concerned by whatever Hogwarts' graduation exam was.

None of this was even touching the binding of Lee's chakra in a fuinjutsu-laced contract with only her birth name, guaranteeing her appearance at specific times and places on foreign soil. That did not scream anything benign or civilian.

So, there were shinobi in England, except there also weren't.

And Lee just wished they'd stick with being one or the other and leave her alone. Of course, thinking that, she might as well wish they'd never plotted her assassination or kidnapping in the first place.

Still, Lee supposed it was nice to get out of that castle and classes for a few days. It gave her a chance to recover before round two with the surviving fire lobster demons. The lobsters that, come next week, Lee may or may not decide to roast alive again, regardless of what Hagrid said it did to her grade.

They both knew very well that the whole point of his class was to survive and destroy the monstrous chakra infused genetic experiments from hell, and that this little pretense he had going on wouldn't last the semester. Just because the other students were somehow fantastically dim enough to believe a word out of his mouth didn't mean Lee or Dead Last had to play along.

"You look pensive."

And there was the fourth member of the students, Weasley Ginny, who in her (his?) spare time was some sort of chakra-based doppelganger of the English shinobi trapped in the form of an eleven-year-old girl.

Lee had… not really touched that since their day in Diagon Alley. She couldn’t say why, other than to blame the hangover of the luck potion, but she'd somehow sort of forgotten about it, or else passed it over and never mentioned to Minato or anyone else that, "Hey, you know that ginger Weasley Tequila? Well, she's actually possessed by a fragment of the English shinobi's chakra and she/he/it seems to have plans."

Somehow, it hadn't seemed pressing.

That or, Lee thought as she tried not to flush, she'd managed to distract herself with Minato. Lee was fourteen going on fifteen, Minato fifteen in about a month, and they'd probably been heading in this direction for years, so it had felt natural. She didn't regret it, but she would admit it was… Well, distracting, like Lee had unintentionally opened some door between them without any thought of the consequences.

Not that they were bad consequences; in fact, the consequences made her feel oddly fluttery every now and then when she looked at his direction or thought that now that it was the weekend and they had some time before classes they could actually spend a decent amount of time together and—

And none of this was helping the fact that Weasley Ginny had shown up to be Weasley Ginny again.

Lee looked around the bookstore. She and Weasley were unfortunately loitering near the back, away from the others. Minato and Uzumaki were distracted by the fuinjutsu section along with the nidaime, the shodaime was chatting up chakra infused plants with a very out of his depth looking Lupin, and Dead Last was squinting at some basic textbook, looking like he was desperately trying to remember how to read English.

Granted, Lee wasn't exactly out of earshot, and the others were certainly sparing half an ear, but it was enough of a semblance of privacy that Lee wasn't exactly thrilled by it.

That and without the luck potion, and maybe even with it, Weasley Ginny unnerved the hell out of her. She'd never felt this way about the English shinobi; at most they had just screamed at each other, and maybe that was because the English nin was currently impotent and had been for years. He'd almost become this expected, bitter thing in the Senju compound, like an overly chatty piece of furniture.

Somehow, though, Lee thought it was more than that. The English shinobi, for all his charm and patience, seemed to have very clear goals. He wanted the kage hat of England, a hat that did not truly exist but which he would force into existence.

This incarnation though…

Well, days later and Lee still hadn't the slightest idea of what he was after.

She'd thought, that first day, that maybe it was Lee's assassination in revenge for the whole blowing him up thing. But he hadn't acted like that; even for someone making nice with her, he was a little too invested to simply be seeking her death. He hadn't asked enough about her strengths and weakness, Konoha's strengths and weaknesses…

In fact, he didn't even seem to take the thing personally at all anymore. Which was great and all, but it left Lee wondering what the hell he was after.

Because he was certainly after something.

"Pensive is a strong word," Lee mused, before replying with an honest answer, "I was just thinking about how I'm onto Hagrid-sensei's little game and that he'd really be doing us all a favor if he dropped the pretense."

This stopped him short. It was very odd, because he'd flutter between looking exactly like you'd expect from a Weasley Ginny, and something that did not belong in a thirteen-year-old girl's body. Every so often, he'd forget himself and that expertly crafted guise would slip.

(The English shinobi, or this incarnation at least, seemed to be fantastic at infiltration.)

"Hagrid's game?" Tequila asked, clearly doubting Lee's sanity.

"The man's trying to murder us all with his genetic experiments, and the entire point of his class is to ensure your team's survival by eliminating them and possibly placing blame on the other team."

Granted, the first time, Lee had thought it was to kill off all the lobsters except your own to make you look better by comparison, but this made more sense. After all, if Lee killed off all the other death lobsters, then no one else would have a chance of passing the class. So, you must have to find a way to stealthily murder your own charges and possibly pin the blame on some hapless third party, or at least have plausible deniability.

"That…" The English nin posing as Weasley Ginny trailed off as if unable to finish his own sentence. "No, no, trust me but a thousand times no."

"What do you mean, no?" Lee balked, forgetting just who she was talking to for a moment. "Have you seen those things?"

Ginny sighed and rubbed at the bridge of her nose. "Hagrid is… fond of horrifyingly lethal creatures and has about as much intelligence as one. By temperament alone, the man is harmless, but thanks to his hobby it's amazing he hasn't gotten anyone killed."

Lee blinked, then blinked again. "What?"

"When he was thirteen, he thought it was a grand idea to raise a giant sentient spider inside the school walls," Ginny said. Then, darting an assessing look at Lee, she confessed, "Luckily for him, before it could kill anyone, he was framed for murder by the young dark lord, and his giant spider was banished to the Forbidden Forest where it still roams to this day, eating the occasional hapless centaur."

It was not hard to read between the lines of that and hear, "I framed Hagrid for murder because it was convenient."

Which, really, was not out of character.

"You'd think with his wand snapped he'd have learned some kind of lesson, but he went on to raise dragons on school property, set temperamental hippogriffs on his students, and, his latest and greatest, crossbred Blast-Ended Skrewts, which I'll be damned if they don't kill somebody."

"Wait a minute," Lee said. Unable to help herself, she asked, "You mean he really expects us to take care of those things?"

"Hagrid loves those abominations against god," Ginny said, looking oddly pleased with herself. "That's why I have elected to stay as far away from Care of Magical Creatures as possible."

Well then…

No, she and the English nin and were not friends, no matter what form he chose to reside in. True, he might not have too much reason to lie, but he also had little reason to tell the truth. Hell, the idea of Lee and Dead Last grappling with their demonic charges and failing the course might bring him unending joy.

England had proved itself more competent than Lee had been willing to admit. Or, rather, she was willing to bet they weren't completely suicidal as a society.

"By the way, not to be rude, but since we appear to be on good terms and whatnot," Lee said, "What exactly are you all doing here?"

"You mean you don't know?" the English nin asked, looking slightly surprised.

"Well, I assumed they, and I suppose you, are all spies." Lee paused, looking down at the girl and hesitating, before blurting, "But you kind of suck at your job."

Ginny threw her head back and laughed, long and hard, the kind of laugh that didn't belong to a thirteen-year-old girl but also didn't belong to the man they'd left behind in Konoha.

"Oh, God," she finally said, breathing hard through her laughter, "You really think that, don't you?"

Ginny shook her head, brushing long hair away from her face. "No, no, Dumbledore just wishes we were spies."

Well, Lee had gotten that part.

"You may not have noticed, Lee, but Dumbledore is panicking," Ginny explained. "He realizes that he has a surprisingly limited window of opportunity in which to capture your interest, and more, he's actively working against the interest of your people. My brother and his idiot friends here don't realize they're meant to be enticing you into his reach or else reporting on exactly what you're up to. They have chosen, instead, to do neither, while ignoring the fact that your murder of the Blast-Ended Skrewt colony as well as your friend's knocking out Draco Malfoy by punching him in the face has earned you quite the following, no matter your rumored status on blood supremacy."

All Lee could think, as the little girl blathered on, was that Lee really wasn't cut out for this infiltration business and that someone besides her should probably be making note of all of this.

"And that's good?" Lee asked.

"Well, it's entertaining for me," Ginny responded with a grin. "More, it means that I suspect today will be especially entertaining."

Why could Lee suddenly feel her stomach sinking down into an unseen pit of despair?

"And why's that?"

"After we're done here, you're going to get to meet your godfather, Sirius Black."

 

* * *

 

 

"Unfortunately, due to his circumstances, we can't go to meet Sirius directly," the man, Lupin, explained quietly as he gathered them into a rented room at the inn and pub that served as Diagon Alley's border.

It was a bit cramped with all of them huddled around the fireplace, but that wasn't really the main source of Minato's discomfort.

"However, he can use the floo to come here, or at least stick his head in," Lupin said with a rather weak smile, as if this was supposed to be funny. No one, not even the Englishmen, laughed.

Minato kept trying and failing to meet Lee's eye.

Everything had been fine enough this morning, though Lee hadn't exactly been thrilled, and the moment Minato had turned his back, apparently Weasley had decided to take it upon herself to warn Lee that it was going to get a lot worse.

She'd been staring blankly into space ever since. Right now, she was looking at the fireplace with a sort of existential dread as if she was just waiting to see what kind of a godfather England would produce for her.

Minato, for his part, felt his own peculiar sense of dread as well.

He was so used to the idea of Lee being an orphan like he was. He'd met her in an orphanage, Lee had grown up an orphan, and other than the bizarre idea that her father was actually a god, the idea of Lee and a clan hadn't really occurred to Minato other than in a general sense that Lee's blood limits probably came from somewhere.

Even a few years ago this might not have mattered, although there might have been an edge of nervous discomfort at the idea of Lee moving out and moving back in with her surviving relatives. Now, though, now Minato suddenly realized that he had a very legitimate reason to approach Lee's parental figures, and that he might not measure up.

Sure, there was Jiraiya-sensei, but the man was practically Minato's father as well (well, more like a perverted uncle). Then there was Hatake Sakumo, Minato supposed, but Minato had always gotten along well enough with him, and it always seemed as if he'd approved of Minato.

This one though, especially given how easily Minato had managed to blow it with the English students, might not.

"His circumstances?" the shodaime asked, as the nidaime apparently was too busy placing himself as far away from Lupin yet still in the room as he dared.

"Yes, Sirius is…" Lupin trailed off and looked regretfully into the fireplace, too distraught to say anything else.

There was a very awkward and tension-filled pause as Lupin waited for the others to say something. Granger Hermione fidgeted but pointedly said nothing, as she had made a point to say nothing to any of them all morning. Weasley Ron looked away, hiding his face in his hands. Longbottom Neville chose to look down at his shoes.

Finally, Weasley Ginny asked in that sardonic tone Minato had come to associate with the girl, "Really?"

"Ginny—" Granger started, but Weasel Tequila, as Uzumaki preferred to call her, wasn't having it.

"He is her godfather, Hermione," the girl said, nodding once towards the very unenthused looking Lee. "Even if you don't like her, she has a right to know."

"So, she can what, tell the ministry?" Hermione balked, head snapping towards Ginny and face contorted with angry disbelief. "This is dangerous and stupid, and we have no idea what Ellie Potter or any of these people really believe in! We shouldn't just risk Sirius' safety because—"

"That's not really your call though, is it, Hermione?" Ginny asked. "Dumbledore went over all our heads, and Sirius is coming whether you like it or not!"

"Maybe Headmaster Dumbledore has a little too much faith in foreign blood purists!"

Minato could only watch with wide eyes, everyone else along with him, as the two went at it, but somehow it was Lee who broke first.

Lee stood, her chakra flaring so that the room seemed small, dark, and cold in the face of her overwhelming power and irritation. "Maybe Lee is sick and tired of being called a racist!"

The English, Minato thought suddenly, hadn't seemed to have felt anything like this, refined killer intent or just the sheer magnitude of chakra that Lee could exude. She had enough power to make trained, grown shinobi cower in terror.

Minato himself couldn't help but feel a shiver running down his spine.

The English, even the girl Weasley who had made a point to look so cold and collected, looked as if they believed they were about to die.

"Hate me, if you must, but do it for something that isn't fueled by your own willful ignorance," Lee hissed out, eyes now glowing as the shadows spread throughout the room. "Whether clans have more or less _chakra_ is irrelevant, the world is what it is, and nothing you shout can change that you will always have less raw power than an Uzumaki."

Granger's face paled, rather than flushed, and her eyes grew wide as she undoubtedly felt that raw power Lee was talking about. The chakra that was only possible when you came from a line of powerful shinobi.

"Lee," Minato said softly.

She looked back, and that spark of anger drained out of her. She slumped back into her sitting position, closing her eyes with a sigh and muttering out, " _When we get back to that damned school, Minato, you and I are doing something fun._ "

As the shadows retreated and the walls seemed to expand once again, the room let out a collective sigh of relief.

The nidaime whacked Lee across the back of her head. " _Watch your temper._ "

The shodaime rubbed the back of his head, chagrinned, as he noted to his brother, " _I'm really not sure you're the one to talk about that, Tobi_."

Senju Tobirama, apparently, was not willing to comment on his own rather cold temper that flared a bit too often for pleasant company.

"Right, well, sorry about Lee, I mean Ellie," Hashirama said with a laugh, "But someone was talking about this Sirius Black person?"

"Well—" Granger started, then stopped, blanching as she looked at Lee. "Sirius is a fugitive; he was framed for betraying Ellie's parents and murdering a dozen muggles, so he's on the run, and if the government finds him they'll put him to death."

"Oh," Uzumaki said slowly. "So he's another missing nin then."

"A missing what?" Longbottom asked, blinking.

"It's what we call fugitives of a hidden village," Minato explained quickly, although that wasn't really right. Missing nin were not so much fugitives as they were deserters, traitors to their village and damned for all time.

"And what do you mean another one?!" Weasley Ron asked in turn.

Well, that was something Minato hadn't wanted to get into. Somehow, the idea of confessing that Konoha currently had the dark lord Voldemort, king of the English nuke nins, trapped in their basement did not seem like it would go over well.

Although that didn't explain why Lee was looking at Weasley in almost pointed exasperation.

Before Minato, or any of them could ask pointed questions, the flames in the fireplace flickered and turned from red to a green that almost matched Lee's eyes. Then, from within the depths, a dark disheveled head with an ear-to-ear grin appeared out of the fire.

The disembodied head, Minato was guessing, of none other than Black Sirius.


	35. A Spoonful of Angst and a Family Reunion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to GlassGirlCeci on fanfiction for the wonderful beta job on the chapter.

_In which Lee's English godfather is introduced along with a few very large misconceptions, Lee officially loses her cool and chooses to make a terrible decision_

* * *

Lee wasn't sure what, exactly, she'd been expecting from the godfather she'd never known existed. No, that wasn't true—she knew what she expected, and that was absolutely nothing, if only because she had never expected his existence.

There had been no mentions of godfathers from the Dursleys, nor from her brief and bittersweet meetings with Death (who, England wanted to insist, wasn't her father at all). More, when she'd left England all those years ago, she'd grown used to the idea of being attached to no one and nothing.

Lee wasn't an oddity in the elemental nations; the second war had left many orphans from all over the continent, Lee was simply a little more foreign than the rest. There was no expectation that Lee or Minato came from anywhere or anything, and even if they'd had no money or clan waiting for them, it'd always been clear how to carve the path ahead.

Lee had no history in Konoha, and she'd never thought of it before, but she was starting to realize she preferred it that way. The relationships she'd forged for herself, with Minato, Jiraiya-sensei, Sakumo-shishou, and all the rest of them had meaning. The relationships foisted upon her by a desperate Dumbledore Albus did not.

Black's head grinned at her from the the fireplace, transported through time and space via English fuinjutsu to this small rented room at the top of a pub. It was hard to tell much about him, given that it was just his head wreathed in green flames, but he looked as if he deserved the title of missing nin. Not so much because of any killing intent, but because of how he looked. He looked as if he truly had been on the run and eating out of garbage cans for years without a village to support him.

His hair was that awkward length that was too long to be short but too short to be long, shaggy, unwashed, and stuck together in clumps. His face was the kind of pale that spoke of living indoors without windows, with an almost waxy hue and dark shadows beneath his eyes. His face had an unnaturally gaunt look, his cheeks almost hollow. More, though, he had the look of a man who had once been quite charming and handsome, who was trying desperately to reclaim what he was, but couldn't help but show the wear and tear of years spent as a nuke nin.

"Hey, Prongslet! Merlin…" The man's head twisted, he spat out ash, and then he squinted through the flames. "Merlin, Moony, I'm not meeting her like this. Can we please get me out of this fireplace already?"

"You know we can't do that, Sirius," Lupin, Moony apparently, said in resignation, casting a wary and meaningful glance towards his shinobi companions.

The people who, according to Granger Hermione, would hand over Black Sirius to the government without a second's pause if given the opportunity. Even now she was casting Lee suspicious and wrathful looks, killing intent waxing and waning as she grappled with the very recent memory that Lee could swat her like a fly if she were so inclined, as well as her own righteous anger. Lee almost found Granger's indecisive rage adorable; it was at the very least so very civilian. It was like she didn't really believe Lee had the guts to go through with anything or was somehow bluffing, that the likes of Granger really could take her in a fight.

As though, after all her accusations of Lee being a racist goon for Konoha's military, she couldn't quite bring herself to accept what that meant. That Lee had been training how to kill men twice her size five years before Granger Hermione even knew chakra existed.

"Come on, Moony," Black whined from inside the fireplace, "This is bloody ridiculous."

"You've done it plenty of times before," Lupin said without any sign of sympathy. "Didn't you do it only a few weeks ago visiting them?"

He waved a hand towards their Hogwarts companions, Longbottom now shifting nervously as if he wished Lupin hadn't gone and pointed that out. The man though, Black, groaned, "Mooney, even I'm not stupid enough to go waltzing around Hogwarts where anyone and their brother can see. Come on, I've been stuck in this blasted house forever and you're not even going to let me talk to my goddaughter face to face? Even after I haven't seen her in thirteen years?"

"Sorry," Lupin said shortly, clearly meaning this to be the final, non-negotiable word. It wasn't, though, as Black, with a huff, pulled himself out of the fireplace and into the room much to Lupin and company's loud protestations.

His clothes somehow suited him. They were worn, too large for his frame, but were clearly made from expensive and chakra-infused fabric that Lee expected only the hideously wealthy English clans could afford. Like him, they had once seen better and brighter days.

He brushed the soot off his dark robes, grinning across at them, and wagging his eyebrows suggestively. "Well, it's just not a party without Sirius Black, is it?"

"What are you doing?!" Lupin hissed, standing and pushing the man back towards the fire, which was now fading from green back into a more natural red. "You can't be—"

Black pushed him aside, shoved him really, and approached Lee on the couch. Before Lee could protest, he reached out, grabbed her arm, and pulled her into a bone crushing hug the likes of which should have had Lee shanking him out of instinct.

As it was, she just stood there, too stiff, practicing breathing exercises as she thought about the fact that the former hokages would kill her if she murdered her own godfather for simply getting too close.

Except shinobi were always very careful to never get too close to one another for that very reason.

"Merlin, you really do look just like your mother," Black said far too fondly, as fond as only those who were truly close to Lee. As if he'd been there teaching her and preparing her for the chunin and jonin exams right alongside Jiraiya and Sakumo. He carded a calloused hand through her hair, fingering red ringlets, a hint of regret in his voice as he took her in. "Not much of Prongs in you at all though, is there?"

And that was the alarming statement that had Black Sirius thrown into and pinned against the wall with chakra while the English civilians spilled forward with exclamations of alarm.

"Ellie, what are you doing?! He's your godfather!"

"Cor, you just stuck him right up against the wall!"

"Lee." Minato placed a restraining hand on her shoulder, likely meaning to give her a warning to just play along when Lee had already played along more than enough. As far as Lee was concerned, coming to this country in the first place, going to their school, and pretending it was all fine and wonderful was more than anyone should have ever expected of her.

Why did Lee feel like she had to justify every action, when these were the people who had seen fit to leave her with the civilians who locked her in a cupboard? Lee owed them nothing, but somehow, impossibly, they were under the impression that Lee owed them everything.

"No touching," Lee said, chakra rising with killing intent from her stomach, watching as Black's dark eyes widened and he swallowed nervously.

"Alright, no touching, I…" he trailed off and had the gall to look hurt, before he hid this with another grin, like it was all fun and games with him pinned to the wall like a butterfly. "No touching. Although, Merlin, Ellie, you know I'm the one who's supposed to be serious."

Lee said nothing, even as he started to ramble, "You know, serious, because my name is Sirius… They did tell you that, didn't they? My name I mean, before you got here…"

"She gets the joke," Minato assured Sirius, giving the man a meaningful look as if to convey that if he knew what was good for him he'd cut it off already. The trouble was, Lee thought as she looked him over, she didn't think Black Sirius did know what was good for him.

As if to highlight this, Lupin Remus was trying for round two in convincing Black to head back into the fireplace from whence he came.

"Sirius," Lupin said desperately as Lee released her hold, moving towards the man as if he were a beloved but wounded dog, "You know you can't—"

"You aren't my mother, Mooney," Sirius cut him off shortly, seemingly oblivious to the wide-eyed staring of Granger Hermione, Weasley Ron, and Longbottom Neville. "Even my mother wasn't much of a mother."

The man clapped then, far too loudly, and his smile was back on his face. "So. Ellie, Ellie Potter, Prongslet, Merlin's beard you're so tall! And finally in Hogwarts, after all these years. Gryffindor, I hope. You did get Sorted, didn't you? I heard you just popped in out of nowhere on Halloween night, very dramatic entrance that, your old man would have been proud!"

Manic, Lee thought distantly, that was the word for it. This man was trying too hard, filled with too much energy in a way that made it seem as if he was covering for something worse. A glance to Minato told her that he was just as put off as Lee herself was.

Weasel Tequila, on the other hand, seemed to be having the time of his life. Like he'd been waiting all morning for this.

"Well," Lee said slowly, when it became clear that Lee and Lee alone was supposed to answer this, "We were put in Gryffindor… It didn't last long."

"Yeah, heard about that from these three the other day," Black said, motioning to the three English rats, who apparently had felt the need to tell Lee's missing nin godfather everything behind her back. Then he stopped and looked at Lee as if something very important hinged on this next question but he still wanted it to seem casual. "You don't really believe in blood purisim, do you Ellie?"

From the way he asked it, it was clear there was only one answer she was supposed to give. "No."

However, unlike all the times Lee bluffed with 'the will of fire', apparently Black wasn't going to call her out on this one.

"Oh, for the love of—" Granger started, mouth hanging ajar, but Black cut her off with a laugh.

"I knew it!" Black said, clapping his hands again in delight and stepping towards Lee as if he wanted to hug her and twirl her about the room right then and there. "There's no way Lily and James' daughter could ever believe in blood purisim."

"Right," Lee repeated dumbly, not sure what else to say, "James and Lily's daughter, there's no way I could believe in blood purism."

Not that Lee knew what blood purism even was, except, maybe, that it had something to do with clans and civilians and how much chakra you could expect from your average civilian bear. Or, for that matter, what the hell being a daughter of Lily and James had to do with anything? Did he really believe that their world view, whatever it had been, would somehow manage to be genetic?

"Right," the nidaime said, apparently as done with this as Lee was. He stood, reached out with a hand. "I'm Tobirama Senju, and this is—"

"Oh, right, right, the magical _ninja_ ," Black said, as if he only now just remembered the rest of them were here. "Right, I was told about you too… Well, told something about you at any rate. From Japan, right?"

"No," the nidaime said shortly with a thin smile, " _Konohagakure_ is a little further than that I'm afraid."

Black's expression fell as his eyes met the nidaime's, lingering there and apparently not liking what he was seeing, and it became clear that for all that the man was excited to meet Lee, he was not excited to make the acquaintance of the rest of them.

And at that realization suddenly it became unbearably awkward. The nidaime, cut off and judged, appeared to have nothing to say, the shodaime was still sitting down apparently not quite sure how to break the ice, and the rest of them looked like they were waiting for everyone else to start first.

"Well," Black said lamely, rubbing the back of his head and suddenly looking years younger and rather sheepish, "I suppose… I should thank you, you know, for taking care of her when I couldn't."

Black laughed, "You know, I spent over ten years in Azkaban, and it never occurred to me that Ellie wasn't out there somewhere on the outside. Of course, I never figured Dumbledore would have to leave her with that hellish sister of Lily's either but—Well, I'm just glad she was alright after all."

No one quite knew what to say to that either. He made it sound like he thought the nidaime or the shodaime had come and picked Lee up off the Dursleys' doorstep without anyone the wiser. Like she'd become a ward of the Senju clan, no, like their own daughter. Black Sirius didn't seem to realize that Lee had left England of her own volition to become another clanless Konoha orphan.

It was probably easier for him that way, Lee couldn't help but think. It was easier for him to imagine that Lee's world was anything like the one he had pictured for her. It didn't matter to him so much what she truly was—in fact, he'd probably run from it—so much as that she matched the idea of what he wanted.

This hypothetical daughter of Lily and James Potter that he'd dreamed up.

"You're welcome," Minato said finally, the only one who had any real right to give that response, given that he was the one who had been there since the very beginning. Yes, if Lee had been taken in by anyone, then somehow it had been him.

Black gave him a strange look, raised eyebrows, assessing and seeming to realize just how foreign Minato was, but shrugged it off soon enough. "Still, we're going to have to talk with Dumbledore about where you're staying over the summer. I'd offer good old Grimmauld Place, except I wouldn't condemn anyone to that hellhole. Except maybe Snivellus, and oh come on Mooney, don't give me that look! You know he deserves it as much as I do!"

"Summer?" Lee asked abruptly, taking a step forward, and feeling as if something monumental was shifting forward without her permission. "What do you mean, summer?"

"Well, you can't stay with me for the obvious reasons, unless you really want to of course, and I'll raise hell if Dumbledore even thinks of putting you with Petunia again," Black threatened, for once on the same page as Lee, which at least there was the small relief that Lee would never have to see Uncle Vernon again.

Except that didn't get to this issue of summer—

"Oh, I'm sure we can make room at the Burrow," Weasel Tequila piped in, moving to stand next to Lee and grin up at her as if all her dreams had just come true.

"Ginny!" Ron cried out, "We don't have bloody room at the—"

"Ronald," the missing nin playing the role of a little girl said through gritted teeth, holding her brother's arm in a death grip, "We'll make room."

"Oh, no, I'm not staying for summer," Lee said with a small, too desperate, laugh, "None of us are staying over the summer."

"What are you talking about?" This was Longbottom, so much softer and timid than his peers, looking at her with wide brown eyes.

Lee motioned to everyone, to all her Konoha peers who were now looking at the English as if they'd just realized something very important, something Lee herself was only just beginning to realize. "We're only here until this Triwizard thing is sorted out, I'm only here until this Triwizard thing is sorted out—"

"But Ellie," Neville said slowly, like he couldn't quite believe what he was saying, "You only just got back, do you really mean that you're just going to leave again as soon as the tournament's over?"

Because that's what these people expected and wanted from her, Lee suddenly realized. Even when they thought she was a racist drafted into a foreign military. They expected her to stay forever, they didn't think a kidnapping attempt was necessary because by setting foot on English soil, Lee had made her glorious return. As if Konoha, the looming war, and everything she'd left behind simply didn't exist out here now that Potter Eleanor was back where she belonged.

They were sitting here already planning the extra bedroom in the Weasley clan compound for her use over the summers, her future career in the English academy…

Lee, as quickly as she could, sprinted out of the room and slammed the door behind her.

She'd done it, she'd tolerated more than she ever should have been asked for, and at the idea of endless lazy summers with godfathers she'd never asked for and civilian friends she'd never wanted, she simply couldn't tolerate anymore.

* * *

There was a long, pregnant pause after Lee sprinted from the room. She was too well-trained for her footsteps to be heard on the stairs just outside, but Minato imagined she was flying down them and well on her way out into the street and the rest of Diagon Alley.

Minato found himself staring at the door with the rest of them, like they were all just waiting for it to open back up with Lee rubbing the back of her head laughing off some dreaded attack by plant zombies that occurred when none of them were looking. Except even Minato knew that Lee wasn't coming back this time.

Still, clearly, none of them knew what to say.

"We're not certain Lee will be back over the summer," the shodaime finally said, almost apologetically as his voice broke the silence, "Or that she would necessarily be staying with the English if she did."

By which he meant she wasn't likely to be back, and if she was, she sure as hell wasn't doing so with English hospitality. However, Senju Hashirama was a little too polite to come right out and say that.

"What?" Black asked, looking at first as if he thought the shodaime was joking, and then, far more seriously, "But she's English! Her father was James Potter for Merlin's sake. You can't honestly expect…"

He kept going, but Minato tuned it out, instead moving towards the door. As he placed his hand on the handle, Uzumaki's hand fell on his shoulder. " _So, you're headed out to look for her too?_ "

Of course he was going out to look for her. Lee and any hint of her clan, background, or England was like setting off a ticking time bomb. That was at home too, in Konoha where her past was so far behind her no one had any idea what it looked like. Minato had no idea how much worse it could get when she was inside England.

And he had the distinct feeling, given this whole conversation and ridiculous set up, that it was going to get much worse. He wasn't sure exactly what was supposed to have happened here, but he imagined that Lee was supposed to have felt flattered by her godfather's attention, perhaps even gained a sense of kinship and belonging that she presumably lacked as a shinobi orphan, and that she would become friends with Granger, Weasley, and Longbottom, so much so that they could convince her to become a missing nin.

Minato didn't think these people understood what they were asking. They didn't realize that leaving Konoha, for Lee, would be making her the equivalent of this man. That you didn't simply leave, even when you were as powerful and beloved as Senju Tsunade, you didn't simply return to your home country.

And the way they said it, as if it went without saying that Lee would come back…

Well, it rubbed Minato the wrong way as well. Certainly, he thought, it didn't exactly endear Black Sirius to him.

Without another word Minato opened the door, leaving Uzumaki to do what she wanted and the rest of them to the tender mercies of the English, and made his way down the stairs and out into the street. Lee was there, sitting on the cobblestone streets and leaning against the brick façade of the pub, staring out into London's hidden village with distant eyes.

" _You're not staying over the summer,_ " Minato said with a smile, sitting next to her so he could stare out with her.

Lee blinked, looked over at him, and offered him a flat smile in return. " _I know, I know that, just…_ "

" _Just what?_ "

" _I can only put up with that so much at a time,_ " Lee said, " _And I know we're going to be here all day._ "

" _Really?_ " Uzumaki asked, sitting down on the other side of Lee, " _All day? We're kind of out of things to talk about, believe it._ "

Minato frowned, hummed, and responded, " _I think Lee's right. This is ham-fisted, but the thought's still there. We're here to receive an impression from these people and start forming bonds. If they really expect Lee to be staying over the summer, if not forever, then this is the starting point for when they convince her it's worth it._ "

" _How?_ " Kushina asked flatly.

" _Family,_ " Minato said. " _Black Sirius, supposedly, is Lee's godfather, and the only palatable connection she has to her clan. To some that might mean quite a bit._ "

That, at least, Uzumaki seemed to understand. Of course she did, Minato thought; she felt the loss of her people more than anyone. Especially now that Uzumaki Mito was gone and all that was left of her clan, of her name, was herself, where there had once been a hidden village. She'd never leave Konoha for it, but he imagined if rumor of survivors cropped up, then she might plead for an extensive leave of absence even with the brewing tension between the hidden villages.

But Lee had never been like that.

At the age of five, without a friend in the world or an understandable word on her tongue, she had been all too willing to forsake her clan name of Potter.

" _And,_ " Minato added as he turned to look at Lee again, " _I don't think they understand what it means to leave a hidden village._ "

If, he thought, they understood what a hidden village was at all. Minato had kept thinking how he didn't understand this place. Even with years of preparation from the English shinobi he hadn't understood this place, and he'd forgotten that with his own people they'd be even worse.

The divide between England and Konoha suddenly seemed incomprehensibly large.

Lee sighed, rested her head against the wall, and stared up at the sky. " _God, we're going to have to go back in there, aren't we?_ "

" _Probably,_ " Uzumaki said bluntly. " _You can't expect Dead Last to hold them off forever._ "

Not to mention, Minato couldn't help but think to himself, that if they lingered out here any longer, then Weasley Tequila (as Uzumaki and Lee had dubbed her) was sure to make an appearance.

Minato couldn't really explain why—well, beyond his own jealous pettiness that he hated to acknowledge—but something about that girl really did rub him the wrong way. You'd think it'd be nice to have someone around their age who was English and seemed to at least understand some things, but all it ever did was set him on edge.

" _We don't have to go back inside,_ " Lee said, " _We can just meet them back at the castle or something._ "

Yes, because that would end well. Lee knew just as well as Minato did that the only reason they were here, why this whole thing had been put together, was for this game of seducing Lee to the English side.

" _Lee, if they don't think they're getting information, it's going to become much more difficult to get out of that castle and get our own._ "

" _You call this information?_ " Lee balked. " _And we can get out of the castle just fine._ "

" _But not with_ English _blessings,_ " Minato noted, and that was the crux of it, this free tour and show of their hand as they tried to move Lee into a position that they wanted. If they outright rebuffed them, Minato doubted the efforts would stop completely; instead they'd simply become harder to detect.

" _Why should I care what they think?_ " Lee spat back, Minato apparently striking quite the nerve, " _What do I owe them?_ "

" _They think you owe them quite a deal,_ " Minato said slowly, calmly, placing a hand on her shoulder in support, " _And that gives us quite the advantage. Lee, it's only a few hours, and you don't have to like it._ "

And Lee knew it too, even if she didn't want to admit or act on it. That was the trouble of being a chunin going on jonin; it meant that sometimes, often, you had to suck it up and do things you really didn't like.

She sighed, letting her head fall forward. " _If he compares me to Potter James one more time, then I swear—_ "

She cut herself off and suddenly looked up, as if she'd just been struck by a brilliant yet outlandish idea. Minato felt his stomach sinking inside of him, and looking across at Uzumaki's sudden grin of anticipation, he felt it sink further.

" _What if there's something I'm just not seeing here,_ " Lee said slowly, " _What if we can do better than simply finding out what they want and where they come from?_ "

" _That would be nice, but I have no idea how you would manage to do that,_ " Minato said with a growing sense of unease, but Lee didn't seem to hear him. Instead she was standing, and with only the slightest of hand gestures summoned a very familiar bottle of golden wine into her hands.

" _What if we see what luck manages to buy us this time?_ " Lee said, uncorking the bottle while Minato leapt to his feet.

" _Lee, no, don't even think about—_ "

It was too late; even as he said it and reached for her she was already taking one large, potentially lethal, swallow of golden death. She stopped, paused, shuddered once, looked him dead in the eye, and said, " _Oh I forgot about that horribly sweet caramel aftertaste._ "

She shuddered again, took a step forward back into the pub, then turned back towards Minato and Kushina, who were staring at her with twin looks of dumb anticipation. " _Oh, and Minato, since this is the getting-lucky potion, afterwards when we get to_ Hogwarts _and Weasel the Tequila is out of sight, we really are doing something fun._ "

Lee walked inside with a collected confidence she didn't deserve, likely spurred on by god only knew what was in that bottle. Minato turned to Uzumaki, Uzumaki turned to Minato, and pointing at the door, Kushina asked, " _Did she just promise you sex?_ "


	36. Luck be a Lady

_In which Weasley Tequila is confronted by Lee high on luck once again, Lee the lucky blackmails Granger Hermione, and the missing nin’s condition of being in multiple places at once is confirmed._

 

* * *

 

 

There were times, many times, that he’d wondered if his wait and see strategy was worth the sheer aggravation he had to put up with on a daily basis. If he’d been a bit more reckless, been a bit less depressed in the chamber, he could be ruling England right now.  


Well, that might be ambitious, but he could at the very least be meeting with his Death Eaters and doing something productive.

 

Instead he was babysitting the golden trio and wondering how he’d been lumped in with magical Britain’s very own version of the three adolescent stooges. Lord, somehow, the appearance of the shinobi had just made it worse.

 

Like that glimpse into Lee’s life had reminded him that there really was a world outside of a Hogwarts ruled by Granger, Weasley, and Longbottom. And damn them all but he wanted it, he wanted it so badly it hurt.

 

But if wishes were horses then beggars would ride. More, there was no point in being impatient now, he’d lasted this long hadn’t he? When Ginny was older, when she had graduated Hogwarts, then he’d have his day. Just watch, at the end of all of this Granger and company would be unwittingly working for him, shoving the wraith that was his other half out of the way, and he’d have himself a very good day.

 

He just had to wait for it.

 

“Bloody hell,” Ron cursed as he fiddled with the extended ear whose other end was surreptitiously being hung from the windowsill of the Leaky Cauldron’s main hallway in an effort to spy on their resident spies, “They’re not saying anything in English.”

 

Granger, sighing, beat Tom to the punch, “Honestly, Ron, they’re alone out there, of course they’re not speaking in English! It’s why I thought eavesdropping was a stupid idea.”

 

“You’re the one who said we should know what they’re thinking!” Ron spat back, flushing and looking more than a little embarrassed.

 

“That didn’t mean I expected them to just sit outside the house and start gossiping about all their plans in English!” Hermione hissed back, bushy hair rising on end with her irritation.

 

As always, Neville tried and failed to calm their tempers, “Guys, guys, it’s alright. We just wanted to make sure they weren’t summoning the ministry, right?”

 

And they certainly weren’t. No, peeking out the window it looked like Lee Eru was sulking with the other two-thirds of Konoha’s golden trio trying and failing to lift her spirits. Yes, it really did seem that Eleanor Potter hadn’t taken to Sirius Black at all. Poor Dumbledore, what would he do now?

 

Hermione gave a small hmph of displeasure, “I suppose so, but they’re trained for this sort of thing, I imagine they could just sneak off later when we’re not watching.”

 

“And then what?” Ron asked, “They don’t know where Sirius will be later. Neville’s right, Mione, if they wanted to turn him in, they’d do it right now.”

 

“So, they might not be turning him in,” Hermione growled, “But that doesn’t mean we should trust them either.”

“I’m not saying that,” Ron agreed, and then looked over at Ginny, wincing, “No offense, Gin.”

 

Tom didn’t know if he should be genuinely impressed or just vaguely amused that Ron had remembered that not only was Ginny in the room, but she was the only one among them who was on any kind of decent terms with their resident ninjas.

 

Truly, Tom couldn’t help but think, they didn’t deserve Lee.

 

“Oi, hey, wait a minute!” Ron said with excitement as he turned back towards the window, “I think she’s coming back in!”

 

She was, but that wasn’t the remarkable bit, what was odd about it was that she… It wasn’t that she was glowing, but that was the word that popped into his head as she watched her, like she was so overflowing with confidence that it simply radiated from her being. Gone was that frustrated, miserable, sulking and replaced with an overwhelming charisma.

 

Suddenly, without knowing why, he found his mind racing back to Ollivanders’ when she’d looked at him and he’d felt…

 

Oh god, his heart, it was happening again.

 

“I need to leave,” he said, not to them, but to himself. Unfortunately, it had the three of them staring at him anyway, clearly somehow not seeing what he was seeing.

 

“Merlin, Ginny, I thought you were the only one that liked them,” Ron said blinking even as he retracted the extendable ear, before he grinned wildly, “Although, I have to admit, that one kid punching Malfoy in the face was just—”

 

Tom didn’t wait to listen, once again he felt out of sorts with this body he’d stuffed himself into, too small by half, and had to get out of here before she and the rest of them walked up those stairs. It was too late though, as always she was quick and confident, moving with graceful purpose up the stairs and cornering before he could dash back in their booked room.

 

“Tequila!” Lee said, her smile a bright thoughtless grin that felt the same as if she’d just thrown a thousand daggers into his heart at once.

 

Lee stepped forward, lifting some of Ginny’s red hair between her fingers, giving him a look Tom almost wanted to describe as sultry, “Tequila, where are you running off to?”

 

Yes, apparently Tom liked them lethally confident. No, liked wasn’t a strong enough word for what he was feeling, suddenly trapped in those bright green eyes, Tom loved them—

 

“Tequila looks like she’s busy,” Minato Namikaze abruptly cut in, snatching Ginny’s hair out of Lee’s fingers. His lips were stretched into a smile that was rather familiar to Tom, it was the kind he’d worn so many years ago at Slughorn’s parties, something desperately polite yet brimming with malice just beneath the surface.

 

“That’s Tequila’s trouble, Minato,” Lee said, glancing over at Minato before pinning Tom through Ginny again with a look, “She’s anything but busy, so many plans and nowhere to run with them. I bet you Weasley Ginny knows absolutely everything there is to know.”

 

Right now he wasn’t sure if he knew his own name.

 

She smiled slowly, a shark’s grin that he somehow couldn’t look away from, “And I bet she’s just dying to tell me.”

 

Before Lee could reach out for Ginny again her hand was snatched, this time, by a very awkward Kushina Uzumaki, who was flushing the color normally reserved for tomatoes, “That really was a getting lucky potion, wasn’t it, Lee? You know what, why don’t Minato and I take you to some out of the way broom closet somewhere where no one will ever look for us.”

 

Minato’s head turned slowly, eyes cold, giving his comrade a frosty look, “Minato and I, Uzumaki?”

 

Uzumaki flushed, her head swinging back to him, “I mean…” she paused, eyebrows lowered, and then said, “No, I actually do mean that. I’m tired of being left out of—”

 

“Broom closets, Uzumaki?” Minato drily asked, which somehow managed to deepen Uzumaki’s blush to shades unknown to both man and tomatoes.

 

“Mione,” Ron asked, looking more than a little dazed, “What am I watching right now?”

 

A fourteen-year-old girl seducing a sixteen-year-old wraith trapped in a thirteen-year-old’s body whilst simultaneously capturing the intense sexual interest and concern of her adolescent teammates. They had gone beyond love triangles, he couldn’t help but think in a daze, he didn’t even know what this shape was anymore.

 

“Mione, right, Hermione,” Lee said, as if her memory had just been jogged, and she turned away from Ginny to stare at Hermione Granger, “That reminds me, Granger?”

 

Hermione squeaked, looking very alarmed, likely reminded of the last time Lee had spoken directly to her. Only, whatever it was about Lee in this moment, that strange oozing charisma, it seemed that Granger was just as hapless to it as Tom himself, and not only could she not look away she also couldn’t speak back.

 

Lee placed a hand on Minato’s shoulder, motioning towards him, “Minato Namikaze is muggleborn, his parents were foreign merchants who immigrated to _Konohagakure_ during the second war. Despite this he not only has enough _chakra_ to be a shinobi, but the cleverness, chakra, work ethic, and talent to be one of the greatest shinobi of our generation on the fast track to be in high command by the age of fifteen.”

 

Minato looked somewhat abashed, rubbing the back of his head and blushing, “Lee, you don’t have to—”

 

Lee then motioned to Uzumaki, “This is Kushina Uzumaki, heir to the Uzumaki clan and Uzushio, whose history dates back at least five hundred years. Not only due to her inherited abilities and techniques, but also her hard work, talent, and innovation she’s currently the same rank as both myself and Minato.”  


Now it was Uzumaki’s turn to look both embarrassed yet pleased at her teammate’s praise.

 

Hermione looked dubious, concerned, likely feeling some sort of trap was closing in but not able to see it yet, “I don’t get what this—”

 

“Inherited blood limits, family techniques, and raw chakra alone cannot and do not make one the best of the best,” Lee summarized, leaving Hermione no room to interrupt, “Yes, those born from civilian families have a distinct disadvantage when entering the academy compared to their peers. Yes, they are statistically unlikely to have nearly as much _chakra_ as their comrades. However, great _shinobi_ have come from civilian roots and we do not disregard that.”

 

Hermione looked stunned, all of them looked stunned, Ron and Neville glancing towards her as if to read what she thought of that and how they were all supposed to respond. It was, after all, an admission that Lee believed what Malfoy believed but that there were also clear examples that people rose above it.

 

Lee, however, continued, “You, Granger, can become a great witch or whatever it is you do here in England, through discipline, hard work, intelligence, as well as sheer raw ability. You will surpass any and all of the English clans, leaving lazy heirs like Malfoy who have forgotten the meaning of power and discipline scrambling in the dirt behind you with ease. However, if you think feeling sorry for yourself and calling anyone who points this out your enemy, then you will remain at best mediocre for the rest of your life. But maybe, in this country, mediocre is all you need to be.”

 

Now Hermione bristled, the spell broken, “How dare—”

 

“Think, Granger, before you speak,” Lee interjected.

 

She was so…

 

No, there really wasn’t another word for it, cool. Lee was cool. She was doing here what Tom wished he’d had the nerve to do in Hogwarts over fifty years ago. Instead, Tom had bowed his head and taken it all with a smile, just waiting for the day when he would rule them all if he could only be patient.

 

“I don’t need advice from you,” Hermione spat, crossing her arms and glaring across at Lee, “You know I’m already the brightest witch of my generation, don’t you?”

 

Then unexpectedly, Lee grinned, “You have chutzpah, Granger. That’s good, you’ll need that. More importantly though, remember this feeling, and remember that if you think you want Eleanor Potter staying in this country she will make it her life’s purpose to tear that title from your bleeding civilian fingers and tell everyone it’s because she’s a Potter and you’re not.”

 

Hermione spluttered, but Lee was already gone, waiving at Hermione cheerfully, hooking her arm in the baffled Namikaze’s, and giving Tom one last meaningful look, “Tequila, you will hand me an in-depth report on everyone of import inside and outside of Hogwarts within twenty-four hours.”

 

A part of him wanted to refute that, say that he didn’t work for her, that she was in fact lucky to even be alive right now. The other part of him still couldn’t quite remember his name or how he got here.

 

By the time he managed to gather himself back together she’d already made her way back into the room where the others were waiting.

 

“Bloody hell,” Ron said, and for once, Tom agreed.

 

* * *

 

 

Somehow, though Tobirama couldn’t say how, they’d gotten stuck on the topic of Black Sirus’ twelve-year wrongful imprisonment at the hands of his capricious government.

 

War was a messy business, civil war even more so, and it was not uncommon for there to be a cleaning of house so to speak. Generally, those who were loyal to the old regime found themselves quickly embarking for the pure world when the rebels came into power. However, it had not been the rebels who won here, the English nin had been beaten back into obscurity by none other than an infant Lee, and Black had instead been hastily imprisoned to assure the civilian population.

 

Though, this was not how Black himself had put it.

 

“There were arrests left and right in those days,” Black said with a sigh, that spark of energy having diminished ever since Lee had fled the room and his offer of paternal affection, “Everybody and their brother was being brought to trial before what was left of the Wizengamot. Of course, that was the trouble, half the Wizengamot had been working for that bastard and were now scrambling to make it seem like they hadn’t backed the wrong bloody horse.”

 

His old friend and their current English chaperone, Lupin Remus, said nothing but simply quietly poured the five of them (Tobirama, Hashirama, Haru, Black, and himself) a cup of tea at the small table in the room.

 

“That’s what I figure, anyway, that they were all so eager to make it seem like they were the most loyal of all. So, my case comes up, and it looks so bloody cut and dry that they don’t even bother with it. Dumbledore thought I was secret keeper, James and Lily had originally intended me to be secret keeper, even Mooney here thought I was secret keeper. Nobody but James, me, and Lily knew that it was really Peter.”

 

“Secret keeper?” Hashirama asked and Sirius just shook his head.

 

“There’s a spell, a really complicated one, that lets you hide a location from anybody. Nobody, no matter how good, can get inside. However, for it to work, you have to have somebody as the spell caster powering the wards and someone as the secret keeper who can give out the location as needed. We didn’t know that Peter would give it to the dark lord himself.”

 

“And so they didn’t even bother to try me, didn’t wait to hear that it was Peter the rat, Wormtail, and not old Padfoot and I spent the next twelve years rotting in hell with my soul sucked out by demons because Dumbledore couldn’t bother to talk to—”

 

“Sirius,” Lupin cut in, giving him a look, and at the sight of it Sirius deflated once again, the anger and heat going out of him and leaving a man who looked so much older than he should have.

 

The people in this country, Tobirama had come to think, looked terribly young. This man though, even in Konoha, for his age he would look old.

 

“Of course, with Peter away, there’s no exoneration for good old Sirius,” Sirius said with a shrug, “And so I get to be under house arrest instead, which is nice and all, but after escaping Azkaban you’d think I’d get an upgrade better than the old family townhouse.”

 

He laughed, shook his head, “You know, I don’t really blame you guys for not wanting Ellie to stay here. I wouldn’t want her staying with me, don’t really, and maybe the Weasleys could take her in but if I think about it the choices really are slim. Well, no wonder you don’t want her staying over the summer.”

 

“Well,” Hashirama said, looking absurdly guilty of all things, “It’s not that we don’t want that but…”

 

It was exactly that.

 

Tensions were rising, Lee was a chunin now and soon to be a jonin, the village could barely afford to send the four of them off like this now and they really expected her to stay for the summer, for years, with no payment being sent back to the village?

 

Black did seem to care, Tobirama would give him that, and he at least appeared to have a very legitimate excuse for not keeping an eye on the girl when England had the chance to. That, however, did not mean Tobirama was going to bend with sympathy.

 

Especially since, as always, that constant English headache was coming back from the proximity of Diagon Alley. God, could these people not make one item that wasn’t vibrating if not tap dancing with chakra? Did they really need to have chakra in their everything as Lee would put it?

 

More, had they not put it together yet, that, “You could just hire her.”

 

Tobirama blinked, watching as all eyes turned towards him, as he realized that he had just said it aloud and English no less.

 

“What?” Black asked, eyes wide and looking as if he wasn’t sure he’d heard quite right.

 

“If you need Lee here,” Tobirama said slowly, regretting every word but feeling in a bit too deep to stop now, “If your people need her here for some task. Then you could simply hire her and a team of _shinobi_ from _Konoha_.”

 

Of course, Sirius didn’t know what kind of a price Konoha would put on a mission that was essentially “sit and look pretty and make the locals feel like they know what they’re doing”. As that’s what it seemed like what these people wanted, from what Black had said.

 

“A task?” Black asked, before laughing, “What, you mean like defeating you know who again?”

 

Lupin hit the back of Black’s head, looking all too much like the reasonable member of a genin trio, “Sirius!”

 

“You know who?” Hashirama asked, leaning forward.

 

“Oh, you know who,” Sirius said with a small smile, before at their confusion explaining, “I mean, the dark lord, someone’s told you all about him right? Merlin, Mooney, what have you guys been doing?!”

 

“The dark lord?!” Tobirama blurted, feeling as if he nearly wanted to fall out of his seat, “Isn’t he dead?”

 

“Well…” Sirius trailed off, eyes darting between each of the foreigners, “Don’t go spreading this too far around, but we don’t think he’s gone at all. 1991, what would have been Ellie’s first year, he infiltrated Hogwarts by possessing one of the teachers. Then, we think part of 1992 he possessed Ginny, good kid but never quite recovered from that if you know what I mean. And now… I don’t know, but Dumbledore’s convinced he’s not gone and I’m not either.”

 

No, he wasn’t gone, not in the way Black meant. He was currently sitting in Konoha fuming, chakra still sealed, because he wasn’t terrorizing his countrymen after years of house arrest. The way Black talked though, it was as if his chakra was still lingering in England.

 

As his chakra had been lingering inside Potter Eleanor’s head.

 

“How—” Tobirama stopped, trying to think of how to phrase this, “How powerful, exactly, would you say this dark lord was?”

 

The man from Lee’s head, he had the chakra one might expect from a low ranking jonin, perhaps a particularly skilled chunin, but Tobirama had always wondered how powerful the man must have been to sacrifice that much chakra. Then, when reading the histories here, he had figured that was all the chakra the man had had and that his soul had somehow trapped itself in her rather than move onto the pure world.

 

“They say the only man he ever feared was Dumbledore,” Lupin said quietly.

 

In other words, only one wizard in this nation was seen as being on par with the man.

 

Which meant that Ren was not all of the man’s chakra, not even close, and that there very well could be another wraithlike piece floating about England. Which, suddenly made it very clear why Dumbledore was so set on reobtaining Potter Eleanor. It wasn’t simply for blood limits, for the wellbeing of the village, but perhaps to eliminate the missing nin as she had once before.

 

“Defeating a missing nin like that, even if he is incapacitated at the moment, would cost a lot of money,” Hashirama cut in with a smile, looking far too calm in this situation. However it seemed to have the intended effect as Black laughed.

 

“Oh, believe me, if Ellie can do it the ministry will be more than willing to pay. Well, if they ever get their collective heads out of their asses. Not to mention it’s on the down low at the moment, so to speak, but if he does ever rear his head for real you can expect some real mass hysteria.”

 

Black smiled, sighed, and then said, “That’s a bit much for a kid though, tell you what, would you let me hire her to attend Hogwarts like a normal kid?”

 

Eru Lee would never be a normal, civilian, girl. Even if, somehow, they paid for her education and absence from Konoha and its wars, she would always and forever be a shinobi. In time, Tobirama believed that even these people would see that.

 

Still, Hashirama smiled softly, reached across the table to promise the man, “We’ll talk to the hokage and see what can be done.”

 

It was at this point out that the girl in question walked in.

 

And the first words out of Tobirama’s mouth were, “What did you do?!”

 

Her chakra… he didn’t even know how to describe it. He’d seen Lee’s chakra far too often, overbearing and pressing as it was, even dampened down it would flood half the village the way Mito’s and now Kushina’s did. It wasn’t larger than usual, but there was something about it that seemed to almost sing, to force Tobirama to look and just keep looking as she radiated the kind of confidence and good fortune one expected from gods.

 

For the first time, when Tobirama looked at her, he believed her self-proclaimed divinity.

 

Lee didn’t answer, walked forward and took the seat next to poor Haru (who seemed to be feeling the effects without understanding why, breaking into a cold sweat just by her sheer proximity) and inspected Black Sirius.

 

Minato and Kushina, both grimacing and looking incredibly alarmed, loitered behind Lee.

 

For too long, she said nothing, causing Black to fidget uncomfortably as if he was more of a schoolboy than her.

 

“Merlin, you really do have your mother’s eyes,” Black babbled, “Look, Mooney, don’t they look just like Lily’s?”

 

Lupin didn’t respond.

 

Minato tentatively reached out towards Lee’s shoulder, “Lee, maybe now’s time to—”

 

Lee just looked over her shoulder at him, not saying a word, then looked back at Black, “Sirius, I haven’t been in England in ten years, and it shows desperately. Listen to Granger, her concerns are sometimes legitimate, and she’ll tell you that I don’t belong inside this country or this school.”

 

“I—”

 

“You mean well, and I appreciate that, but don’t force me to do something that you think is for my own good. You remember how well that went for you, don’t you?”

 

Black laughed, rubbing the back of his head, looking like Lee had hit entirely too close to the mark, “Geez, Prongslet, you’re so eerily intuitive—"

 

“You’re doing it to me, even if it’s for something you truly believe in, would not be all that different from what your family did to you. More, I can’t guarantee our version would end any differently than yours did. Don’t push this, Sirius Black, or none of us will like the consequences.”

 

Black opened his mouth, closed it, then said, “Alright?”

 

With that, she summoned herself a cup of tea and smiled, “That went smoother than I thought, it’s nice when things come together.”

 

Tobirama’s eye drifted to the door where a rather traumatized Granger, Weasleys, and Longbottom were only just now walking in. Meanwhile, behind Lee, Kushina and Minato looked as if they were continuing to regret everything.

 

Tobirama didn’t know what was happening but he was dearly wishing it hadn’t happened as well.

 

“A toast!” Lee cried out, raising her cup of tea with a delighted grin, “To the first task of the Triwizard Tournament, which for some reason I’m certain will involve dragons.”


	37. A Requiem for Bang-Ended Scoots

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to GlassGirlCeci on fanfiction for betaing the chapter

_In which Lee has a plan in the very likely circumstance that Hagrid Rubeus will harvest her organs upon her unfortunate demise in the First Task, Weasel Riddle Tequila decides that something must be done, and Minato doubts Lee has a plan in place for the First Task and questions the luck potion results until they work in his favor._

* * *

 

 

In retrospect, Lee would blame both Minato and Tequila.

 

If they hadn't been so insistent she be responsible, she never would have gotten into this mess in the first place.

 

Ignoring the fire, as well as the healthy genjutsu Lee had placed over everything to help the English forget there'd ever been a fire, Lee turned to Minato. "You know… Maybe it really is dragons."

 

Minato, looking back at her, simply said, "And I want a refund on our first date."

 

* * *

 

 

"Very nice, Tequila," Lee said as she quickly scanned through the near fifty pages of notes he'd handed off to her, "Very detailed—of course, now I'll have to connect all the names to the faces…"

 

She looked up at him, grinned that stupid cheerful grin she seemed so terribly fond of giving, and said, "You have my eternal gratitude."

 

The question of why, upon returning to Hogwarts after that delightful trip to Diagon Alley, Tom had felt the need to sit down and do this, was entirely beyond him. Why he'd felt the need to spend multiple near-sleepless nights on the damn thing was even further beyond him.

 

Well, no, that wasn't quite right; upon reflection, he knew why he had done it. More, he'd known that somehow, in that single second inside the Leaky Cauldron when she'd climbed the stairs to meet him, Lee had known what he would do and how to get him to do it with little more than a sentence or two.

 

How long had it been since he had done anything remotely productive or useful? He had wasted away the past two years scheming the demise of a girl who hadn't even had the decency of being in the country. The fifty before that he had squandered inside of a diary, slowly going mad.

 

There was no path forward, nowhere to turn, and so instead he had turned inward, bitter and seething at his place in the world and everything he'd stolen from himself. Even he, proud as he was, could admit that much.

 

Still, that she had seen that—and he was certain she had seen that, in so little time when he used so many facades… Sometimes, he was struck with the impression that she was uncommonly dense and that only the Namikaze boy she hung around with had any concept of human interaction, and other times he wondered if she wasn't wearing a mask cleverer than anything Tom had put together.

 

He'd always had far too much bitter pride to consider playing the fool.

 

They were currently in the library, Lee having skipped Divination while he had decided to take a well-needed break from third-year Potions. Tom had not missed Slughorn, but somehow Severus Snape seemed to be just daring him to wish that fat, brown-nosing, nepotistic bastard was back inside the castle.

 

Tom may have had to suffer through those god-awful parties, biting his tongue and smiling until he had the chance to finally squeeze some useful information out of that pig, but at least he hadn't spent every class period defending Ginevra Weasley's grade just for the misfortune of having been born a Weasley and placed into Gryffindor.

 

Still, early into his impersonation of Ginny, he'd decided that Ginny didn't have to be what Tom Riddle had been. For one, she hadn't been to start with: her first year had been a disaster, grade-wise (for obvious reasons). Second, well, what did it get him to make Ginny the best and brightest Hogwarts had seen in fifty years? Ron Weasley's animosity and suspicion, certainly. He chafed as it was under the pressure of his older and more successful brothers; his little sister surpassing him would likely be more than the boy could handle. More, it brought attention to Tom—for now, Ginny didn't need attention and she didn't need followers. She just needed to be in the right place at the right time.

 

Besides, he'd already been through Hogwarts once; it was positively mind-numbing to have to go through it again. He was going to milk that trauma excuse for all it was worth and then some. So far, even two years later, no one had the guts to try and stop him.

Lee, it appeared, intended to do the same even without the excuse of soul-sucking diaries or basilisks.

 

He smiled over at her as she read more thoroughly through his notes, frowning at his lines telling her to pick up a bloody copy of Hogwarts: A History already, which she could nick from Granger were she so inclined, and noted, "Now, I know why I'm skipping class, but surely you can't think that you'll get away with it."

 

"Oh, I've been getting away with it for years," Lee said with a small distracted hum. "Well, perhaps not from the _nidaime_ , but given that we're just reading those bloody tea leaves again, he will probably take pity on my wretched soul."

 

Tom stared at her for a moment, the unshakeable confidence with which she said that which would give him a run for his money. "Lee, are you honestly suggesting you've managed to fool your teachers into forgetting your absence?"

 

Well, she was talking about Trelawney; given that the woman seemed to have her head stuck in some other dimension, Lee very well could get away with simply never making an appearance.

Lee looked up from the pages, blinked at him, and said in a rather blank tone, "I don't see why not. I am, after all, one of the best genjutsu practitioners in the village, surpassing perhaps even the best of the Uchiha."

 

He wanted to laugh—he truly, dearly, wanted to. Somehow, though, and he couldn't quite say why, he could not simply laugh her claim off.

 

Some part of him truly loathed that.

 

"You really do hate all of these people, don't you?" Lee noted with a small, amused smile.

 

"You haven't been stuck here two years," he pointed out. "Spend enough time in the Gryffindor dorm, and you'd feel much the same."

 

Even during his first time through Hogwarts, he hadn't exactly been chummy with anyone. Friendship had eluded him entirely, mostly because his peers were so very dull and at that point in time rather useless. Tom Riddle had to be abandoned; his Hogwarts peers would never let him transcend to Voldemort if they remembered where he came from, and so he'd had to grin and bear it for five bloody years.

 

Until, of course, he'd shoved himself in that diary.

 

"You seem to get along well enough with your comrades," he mused, taking her in. "Given your abrasive personality, I would not have expected that."

 

She looked a little surprised by that, putting down his papers to think. "I don't know if I'd call us friends, really. Dead Last is kind of stuck with Minato and I, given the whole _genin_ team thing. Pretty sure he'd prefer for me to just leave him alone already, even though I've saved his life multiple times now. As for Uzumaki, she's… I really have no idea what's going on with her except that puberty may be convincing her that her rivalry with Minato is a sexual thing."

 

"You don't say," he couldn't help but drawl.

 

Although, truth be told, he hadn't seen enough of the one she called Dead Last to label him as incompetent enough to earn the name Dead Last… Given the fact that he had disarmed and knocked out Malfoy without a wand, he was already leagues beyond any Hogwarts student. But he had the feeling Lee wouldn't appreciate that thought.

 

"And what about Namikaze?" he asked.

 

"Oh, Minato, well we've been best friends forever," Lee said with a suddenly fond smile, as if all was right with the world simply by bringing him up.

 

Yes, he'd noticed that too, that of all her relationships with all her friends, she and Namikaze seemed unbearably close. He, after all, was the only one who seemed worthy of his first name.

That had been… bothering him of late.

 

In truth he had no room to speak; wasn't entirely sure where he stood on this to begin with, but all the same, as he turned it over in his mind, he was beginning to like this Namikaze character less and less. He was… It was as if Tom Riddle was actually what Tom Riddle had pretended so desperately to be. Charming, affable, dangerously intelligent, but with a core sense of good that not even a magical military could strip from him.

 

By the age of sixteen, Tom Riddle had been indirectly responsible for the death of Myrtle Warren, and for the sake of a horcrux he had called it murder. He wondered if anyone had died at fifteen-year-old Minato Namikaze's hand.

 

"Tequila?"

 

He started, forced himself to smile, and said with a laugh, "Yes, you do seem rather close."

 

She stared at him, eyes narrowing, and he wondered if she would, if she could, see through that. She would have in Ollivanders, had seemed to see through every thought he'd had almost before he had it. Here, though, whatever illumination there'd been appeared to be snuffed out.  


Still, he was going to have to do something about Namikaze.

 

"Have you given any thought to the first task?" he asked, distracting both her and himself. "It's coming up soon, November twenty-fourth, that's only a week away."

 

"Am I supposed to give it any thought?" Lee asked.

 

"Well, it might behoove you to," he supplied, "Older wizards than you have not simply failed but died from it."

 

"Oh, believe me, I'd gotten that idea," Lee said with a small laugh, "I'm perfectly aware of exactly what this tournament is."

 

He had a feeling he was going to regret whatever her answer was. He was still reeling over the fact that she was convinced Rubeus Hagrid was the kind of maniacal mad scientist one saw in dreadful science-fiction films.

 

"It's an assassination attempt," Lee finished, looking rather proud of herself.

 

"It is not an assassination attempt."

 

"Of course it is," Lee dismissed him, looking far too at ease discussing her own gruesome demise. "Ensure I am in a certain place at a certain time, focused on a particularly dangerous task for a reward; if I was an English _nin_ I'd take it as an opportunity to kill me off and harvest my organs, too."

 

"Harvest your organs?!" Hadn't death been enough?

 

"As the last of a hideously overpowered blood limit, everybody be wanting Eru Lee's organs," Lee said, descending into truly dreadful slang. "I expect they're intending to deliver them to Hagrid- _sensei's_ doorstep on the twenty-fifth in a cooler."

 

He opened his mouth, closed it, and then opened it again: "There are so many things I could say to that."

 

Did he point out that Rubeus Hagrid did not want Ellie Potter's frozen eggs in a cooler? Did he point out that even if the man received them, for all his hobbies in breeding monstrosities, he would not engage in necromancy or any other sort of dark ritual to make something out of Ellie Potter's severed limbs? Did he point out that it was not an assassination attempt, if only because he himself had stuffed her name into that goblet?

 

Except, well, it had been an assassination attempt. He had summoned her in order to kill her, only backing off when he'd realized she'd been a bit more than he had been expecting, and that she was such an antithesis to Dumbledore's chosen warrior that there was little joy in it.

 

More, it suddenly struck him, someone else could very well have placed her name in the goblet. He had done so, but if he had considered it, then surely there were others above the age of seventeen who had considered it as well.

 

Still, was that his concern?

 

Perhaps, if there was another, if this was what Ellie Potter—Lee—suspected it was, then it would behoove him to see her in action. If she proved disappointing and died, then so much the better for him. If she succeeded by dumb luck or the skin of her teeth, he could continue to gleefully plan her demise and his glorious revenge. If she lived up to his expectations…

 

Well, then things might finally get interesting.

 

"Why am I not liking the expression on your face right now?" Lee asked, startling him from his thoughts.

 

"Oh, I was just thinking that, given your concerns, I'm a bit surprised you're so blasé about it," he said with Ginny's cheekiest of grins that would have had Ron punching her in the teeth.

 

"That's because I already have a plan," Lee said, vanishing the papers to some unseen dimension where she seemed to store an ungodly number of things.

 

"A plan?" he asked blankly, "When you have no idea what the task even is?"

 

"Yup," Lee said with a grin, "I got it all worked out."

 

She grimaced then. "Of course, I promised myself I wouldn't do this sort of thing anymore. But… England really is leaving me no bloody choice."

 

"What sort of thing?" He got up as Lee stood and began to saunter out of the library, "Lee, what sort of thing? What are you going to do?!"

 

Perhaps to be expected, she didn't even bother to answer.

 

* * *

 

 

"Lee, shouldn't you be thinking about the task?" Minato asked Lee during Defense.

 

Moody had once again left the class to their own devices to practice a stunning jutsu, a red beam of light that would eject from the wand and disrupt chakra and motion of the enemy combatant, which had given Minato essentially a free period to spar and talk with Lee.

 

English jutsus were…

 

It was very different from using hand seals. It'd taken Minato days to capture the feeling of how much chakra, exactly, was supposed to be flowing through the wood. Even then, his right hand was starting to cramp from the constant flow, versus the more evenly distributed chakra used in hand seals. Add on that the exact enunciation required, the definite and subtle movements of the wood, and it was harder than Minato remembered ninjutsu being in a very long time.

 

He'd gotten it, he may have stayed up until midnight multiple days in a row to master this goddamn jutsu, but that didn't mean he liked it.

 

Especially since Lee, as usual, had no trouble at all, and worse yet, Haru, Dead Last, seemed to have something of a knack for it. Maybe since he had no feeling for his chakra as it was, had spent years over-focusing on making hand seals, but it'd taken him practically no time at all to produce a successful stunner.

 

And Minato would not be worse than Dead Last.

 

It was something of a relief to have been able to demonstrate the spell successfully to Moody and receive permission to beat the ever-living shit out of Lee. Something it seemed that Moody heartily approved of. Of all the Englishmen they'd met thus far, Moody seemed to be the only one who was truly a fan of the shinobi mindset.

 

And true, they were using taijutsu only, if only to avoid both collateral damage and giving too much away. Still though, it was nice to get some practice in during school hours.

 

"You know, Tequila brought that up the other day," Lee mused as she stretched in preparation for round two, "And I have thought about it—have it covered, even."

 

"You have it covered?" he asked.

 

"Sure, I mean, I was going to go and gather intelligence in the next few days," Lee said, which could mean anything from skipping classes, lacing professors and English officials with genjutsus, to some combination of these, "Although for some reason I'm really certain it will be dragon."

 

"The only reason you think that is because you drank that luck potion." The potion that Minato really wished he had been able to pour down the drain. Lee was already a force of nature, Lee high on luck was…

 

Well, he wasn't certain if he was glad or relieved that it had worn off by the time they'd made their way back to Hogwarts.

 

"That potion is useful," Lee said, before grimacing and admitting, "Although the hangover is death."

 

"Useful?" Minato balked as he stepped into an initial fighting stance, watching as Lee did the same, "Lee, what exactly did you manage to accomplish with it?"

 

"Well, I got a very useful report from Tequila," Lee said as she swiftly closed in, leg rising to knock him off balance, just missing as he dodged. "I'll hand it to you after class."

 

"And I'm sure it's filled with useful information," Minato spat as he made to jab her in the face, barely missing as Lee managed to duck in time. He couldn't say why, especially as Weasel Tequila seemed to get on with them more than the others, but that girl was really starting to get on his nerves.

 

"I also accomplished that," Lee said, nodding meaningfully towards Granger.

 

Granger, as it stood, had performed the stunning spell as well and was now meticulously practicing against Weasley Ron. However, she looked anything but pleased; in fact, she looked almost murderously angry as she surreptitiously glanced over at Lee and Minato every few seconds.

 

"She looks like she wants to kill us all," Minato said, as somehow after terror and alarm in Diagon Alley, Granger Hermione had chosen to settle on rage yet again. Although, Minato did have to say, it'd been several days since she'd last called any of them blood purists.

 

"That's because she knows I'm winning," Lee said.

 

"Winning?"

 

"She may have those essays," Lee said, taking a moment to stop fighting and smile cheerfully at Granger Hermione, her true opponent, "But I can destroy her tiny world in practical results. Now she's going to do everything in her power to ensure I never stay in _England_."

 

Minato thought it fitting that this was the moment he was able to kick Lee across the face and hurl her to the floor.

 

"Lee, that plan may be so far outside of the box that Granger's not even aware there is a box," Minato said as Lee picked herself up off the floor with a groan.

 

"It will work," Lee insisted as she brushed herself off, "You'll see."

 

Well, he thought as he glanced over at Granger, who was trying to look busy correcting Weasley's spell, he'd likely see something by the end of all of this.

 

"Seriously though," Minato said as he looked back towards Lee, "We should plan something for this first task. I'll help, really. This is not something you should put off to the last minute."

 

This last bit probably went without saying, everyone would help Lee as needed, but Minato truly did mean it. Whatever they had to do, whatever they were throwing Lee into, he would help her.

 

"Well, if you want to skip class and go snooping around the castle with me, it'd be appreciated," Lee said before giving him a somewhat odd, almost embarrassed look. "We really haven't gotten much time together, have we?"

 

They…

 

"You—" He flushed, rubbed the back of his head, and pointedly looked away from her. "You mean, well, you mean like a date?"

 

He stopped himself, laughing the notion off. "No, dates on missions are bad ideas, Lee. Besides, sneaking around _Hogwarts_ isn't much of a date, is it? I'd kind of prefer dinner, or a movie, or a festival or something…"

 

"Minato," Lee said, motioning to their surroundings in all their glory, "Do you see any restaurants, movie theaters, and/or festivals in this place?"

 

Sadly, all Minato saw were sweaty teenagers trying and failing to use ninjutsu.

 

Besides, when the hell did Lee become socially aware enough for dates? Wait, when did she become socially aware enough to start any of this? She'd been the one making moves, with him flabbergasted and left in the dust. How was this even possible?

 

Unless…

 

Was it somehow the luck potion?

 

Had Lee's monstrous love potion managed to move faster than he had?

 

… He really didn't want to think about that.

 

"Sure, we can go looking for your dragons after class," Minato said with a sigh. It wasn't even worth arguing; he was so tired.

 

"Great," Lee said, clapping her hands together, "We'll start by interrogating _England's_ Orochimaru, Hagrid."

 

Never mind, that sounded like the worst date in the world.

 

"Oh, look at that, Dead Last just kicked the shit out of Malfoy again with English ninjutsu," Lee said with a smile, looking over at the stunned Haru standing over a magically stunned Malfoy Draco. "Always good to know that Konoha's Dead Last is something like England's top five."

 

Yes, Minato thought, he really was having an awful day.

 

* * *

 

 

The edge of the Hogwarts grounds where Hagrid lived was an idyllic place right on the edge of the lake as well as the Forbidden Forest. It was quite scenic, a cozy English cottage, if one ignored the fact that in the lake there was rumored to be a giant squid and, in the forest, giant man-eating spiders, territorial centaurs, and god only knew what else.

 

As always, Lee was convinced this place was weeding through its students and they were somehow too stupid to figure it out.

 

Now, Lee probably wasn't particularly welcome in this place. But, on the first day of classes, Hagrid had overenthusiastically invited her over tea and something called rock cakes, and since she'd gone and blamed the unfortunate and consistent demises of the Blast-Ended-Skrewts on Malfoy's Slytherin schemes, she'd been in his good books again.

 

Good enough, Lee was hoping, for him to let slip something regarding this mysterious task.

"Lee," Minato said slowly as he looked at the hut and the three-headed dog guarding its entrance (rumor had it that its name was Fluffy), "Why exactly are you so convinced this Hagrid knows something?"

 

"Simple," Lee said with a grin, "If I was the English kage, then who better to set up a lethal chunin exam equivalent than the most lethal man here?"

 

"Moody?" Minato asked.

 

"Clearly, Minato, you have not been to Care of Magical Creatures." Once again Lee was really feeling that she had gotten the short end of the stick when it came to course selection. Divination was a joke in which Trelawny seemed to live for predicting Lee's gruesome demises, and Care of Magical Creatures was the death trap aiming to make Trelawny's visions a reality.

 

With that, Lee felt there was no time like the present and bounded up to the door and knocked. For a moment there was loud rummaging, then the door was yanked open to reveal the man in question looming in the doorway.

 

And he did loom.

 

The cottage, clearly, had not been built with him in mind, and he stood so tall that you couldn't see his head beyond the doorframe. Instead, the entryway was taken up by his hulking body, no way to move in past him.

 

" _Who is it?_ " he asked in his gruff brogue. There was a pause, and then a delighted, " _Ellie Potter! You finally came._ "

 

" _And I brought a friend,_ " Lee said, motioning to Minato, who awkwardly waved at the man, looking as if he'd rather be anywhere else in the world.

 

" _Come in, come in,_ " he said, moving aside and ushering them into what… Lee had not at all been expecting.

 

Sure, the outside was cozy enough, but inside it was just as small and… oddly lacey. Lee had never been inside Orochimaru's clan compound, but she had been inside of his lab, and it had always had a sterile feel. This was the exact opposite: dirt was everywhere, but more than that, there was a small fire in the fireplace and a cauldron of stew cooking over it. The furniture was worn, entirely too small for the man in question, but still too large for the small living quarters he'd been given.

 

" _I'll make some tea for you,_ " Hagrid said in glee, although the 'you' came out more of a 'yeh' and the rest was only barely understandable, " _It's too bad, you just missed Ron, Hermione, and Neville._ "

 

"Yes, that is a shame," Minato said with a forced smile, likely thinking it'd been a damned good thing they'd missed England's legendary three.

 

Lee, however, was still distracted looking for signs of the experimental breeding she knew was happening in this place. Was there a trapdoor somewhere? It didn't look like it—didn't feel like it, either, as Lee sent chakra out to search beneath the hut. Was he… Was he employing a genjutsu strong enough to fool her?

 

" _Ah, Ellie, careful of the book!_ " Hagrid cried out, just in time for a book bound in crudely-stitched leather to jump out at her with wooden teeth aiming to bite her hand off. Lee jerked back and instinctively threw a kunai straight through its pulpy heart, then watching as it appeared to go through its death throes.

 

They all stood in silence for a moment.

 

" _You know, Ellie,_ " Hagrid said awkwardly, " _You got to have patience with your books sometimes._ "

 

Lee said nothing, and neither did Minato; they just stared as the book finally went still, its pages left lying open while words bled out of it as ink on the table. Hagrid, sheepishly, and with a rather mournful look, placed the book back on the shelf and mopped up its ink-blood with a worn rag.

 

Lee was still trying to decide if that book had been the first English assassination attempt.

" _Sorry, Professor,_ " Minato said slowly, as if almost tasting the words as he said them, " _About your book._ "

 

Hagrid tried to laugh—tried and failed. " _Oh, it's… Well… You don't need to call me professor…_ "

 

He trailed off, looking meaningfully at Minato, and in understanding Minato replied, " _Minato Namikaze._ "

 

 _"Right, Minato, it's not your fault. I should have… Well… It's not your fault._ "

 

Lee didn't know whether she was an addict or if she'd simply enjoyed the ease of it too much, but she suddenly was wishing she'd taken some of that luck potion before coming here. Turning her head and watching as Hagrid lumbered to the kitchen to start the pot of tea, Lee decided that she was eating and drinking nothing and getting out of here as fast as she could.

 

"Hagrid-sensei," Lee asked, genjutsu lacing her voice ever so slightly, the kind that compelled one to answer but was subtle enough to sneak under the radar of most, " _What's the first task for the Triwizard Tournament?_ "

 

" _Now, you know I can't tell you that,_ " Hagrid admonished, " _That'd be cheating!_ "

 

That… The man shouldn't have had enough chakra for that. Now, Lee wasn't the greatest of sensors, she wasn't the nidaime, but this man didn't have the yin chakra to deflect that kind of a genjutsu so easily. There wasn't even a pause, not even a blink, as he kept on making his tea and humming.

 

Lee was going to die in this place.

 

" _Professor_ ," Minato said, polite as ever as he sat at the table, " _They say people have died in the past tournaments. I don't care so much if Ellie wins, just that she gets home._ "

 

Hagrid left the kettle and sat at the table, the ground shaking as he hit the chair. " _Nonsense, Dumbledore's here this time, and he'll make sure the lot of you make it through even dragons—_ "

 

Lee whirled, stalking towards the table and looking up at the giant man (who was somehow taller than her even when he was sitting), " _So it is dragons!_ "

 

Hagrid paused, looked as if he'd had his hand caught in the cookie jar, then winced. " _I wasn't supposed to say that. Look, you got to pretend you didn't hear that—_ "

 

Minato was giving her a look, one Lee knew too well, because that was far too obvious. Lee had already said it was dragons, more than once, in English, in front of Dumbledore's adolescent spies. Word would have come back to him and he would have had more than enough time to prep Hagrid on what answer he had to give. Only, why was this so obviously given? Did that mean it was dragons or it wasn't?

 

What was he deflecting from?

 

Unwillingly, Lee's eyes drifted towards the window and the forest, where those few remaining Blast-Ended-Skrewts grew bigger with every passing moment as they devoured one another.

 

Without a word Lee strode out of the hut, leaving Minato to sprint after her as she made her way to the forest where the abominations waited, writhing inside their pits.

 

She dumped a river into the pits out of nowhere. Unfortunately, rather than drowning the beasts, this still caused them to explode with enough force not only to light part of the Forbidden Forest on fire, but also part of Hagrid's hut.

 

And, even after the fire was out, the forest restored, and the beasts safely dead, Lee couldn't help but feel that she was missing something.

 

"If anyone asks," Lee said to Minato, "Then Malfoy the Ferret's the one who did it."


	38. Dead Last's Brave New World

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to GlassGirlCeci on fanfiction for the excellent beta job. And thank you to anon for prompting the early update.

_In which Haru concludes that he really has entered some bizarre reality that Lee must be responsible for, Tobirama and his brother discuss the world they left behind, and Lee still has a plan_

* * *

 

"Very good Mr. Matsuda! That'll be ten points to—" Professor Flitwick paused, caught himself, and sheepishly said, "Well, consider it a job very well done for Konohagakure."

This was Haru, chronic dead last of Konoha since the age of six, being praised for successfully casting yet another English jutsu. It was official: Haru had left the planet Earth and somehow entered some alternate Lee reality in which, impossibly, he was not dead last.

"Thank you, professor," Haru said, the accented English words catching awkwardly in his throat as he shuffled his way back to his seat under the whispering and glaring of his Gryffindor English classmates. Well, granted, it was only some of them, but Granger Hermione was looking at him the way some people in the academy used to look at Namikaze Minato.

Like they couldn't believe this civilian orphan upstart was daring to prove himself better than them. Haru, naturally, had never gotten those kinds of looks. Glancing over at some of his other classmates, he was also getting the other kinds of looks Minato used to get that Haru had never gotten either.

Haru didn't consider himself bad looking, but in the academy, and a ninja village in general, good looks were often equated with competence. Being a talented and powerful ninja was like being a rock star; it tended to increase your sexual appeal tenfold. Haru, being somewhat average-looking to begin with and worse than average when it came to the ninja arts, had never attracted many fangirls.

If course, Minato had probably never really noticed, given that Lee had driven most of them off, but at the moment while Minato was swimming in his Lee/Kushina love triangle, Haru was getting a surprising amount of attention from the female Hogwarts student population.

Of course, Minato was still better than him, even at these English jutsus, and Lee was still frolicking ahead and leaving the rest of them in the dust, but…

But Haru was beginning to realize that he was this place's Namikaze Minato.

They didn't seem to realize or care that he spoke English half as well as the rest of them on a good day, that even if he could point and swish a wand he was still the worst shinobi in his graduating class by far and a fifteen-year-old genin to boot, and that not even his own shishou took him seriously anymore.

Tobirama-shishou had never said as much, but Haru had the feeling that if he didn't pass the chunin exams this time around, then Tobirama would be sending him straight to the genin corps, rinnegan or not.

" _Very well done, Dead Last,_ " Lee applauded him as he made his way back to Konoha's corner of banishment inside of the class, making it clear that while she was impressed, he was still dead last to her and always would be. " _You have a knack for this_ English _ninjutsu bullshit._ "

Of course, Lee hadn't changed one bit.

" _Thanks, Lee,_ " he said numbly as he took his seat, wondering when this universe would right itself and remember that Haru was and would always be Dead Last. The other shoe had to drop, it just had to. He couldn't take much more of this.

" _Yes, nice job, Haru,_ " Minato said, smiling pleasantly over at Haru, except… If Haru hadn't spent every day together with him for about a year, then he probably wouldn't have seen anything, but Minato looked… A little upset.

He looked kind of like how Haru had felt during the academy—older than everyone in his class and watching Lee and Minato destroy everyone—and when he'd been placed on a genin team with the rookie of the year bastards.

Like he was just grinding his teeth while he hated every inch of Haru's thoughtless success.

Minato, however, said nothing more and instead flipped through an intensive, handwritten English report of some kind.

What was his problem? He'd pulled off the same jutsu, probably had managed to do it faster than Haru, too, not that Haru had really been paying much attention. Generally, the less closely he watched Lee and Minato's wild success and progress, the better he felt about himself. That was a lesson that had been difficult to learn but kept his sanity alive.

" _Seriously though, Dead Last,_ " Uzumaki said, peering over her shoulder to look at him to give him a rather assessing look, " _How the hell are you so good at this stuff? Every time I try, stuff just keeps exploding._ "

" _Too much chakra, Uzumaki,_ " Minato said without even looking up from his reading.

" _You have too much chakra, you flakey—!_ "

"Miss Uzumaki, that'll be ten points from—" Professor Flitwick stopped, caught himself again, and sighed even as the English student tried and failed to perform the jutsu for the class. "Do remember that your classmates need to demonstrate their work too."

"Sorry, professor!" Uzumaki cried out, and with her usual determination declared, "It won't happen again, believe it!"

Flitwick didn't look like he believed it, if only because Kushina had been reprimanded for disrupting English classes even more than Lee with her constant loud outbursts and bickering sessions with Namikaze. Not that this was anything new; Uzumaki Kushina had been a regular in detention along with Eru Lee back in the good old academy days.

Regardless, as soon as the ridiculously small man's attention (and Haru was still getting used to that blood limit, something called Goblinism here in England) turned away from them and called the next hapless student, Uzumaki turned expectantly back to Haru.

Who really did have no explanation.

" _I, um, read the instructions?_ " he said.

Kushina seemed utterly unimpressed. " _You read the instructions?_ "

" _Sure. You just, you know, do the wand motion thing and make sure to say the words exactly correctly and poof, jutsu._ "

The three were staring at him like he'd just said the dumbest thing they'd ever heard. No, they were looking at him like he'd said something that Eru Lee was supposed to go ahead and say. The trouble was that it was that easy! He didn't know what trouble the rest of them were having, but honestly, the whole process was surprisingly thoughtless. He didn't even have to think about chakra, he just swished, chanted, and poof there it went.

" _Lee's right,_ " Kushina said dully, " _That is bullshit._ "

It was like a switch was hit right then inside his brain. Suddenly, it wasn't weird anymore, and instead a pit of anger began to bubble up from his stomach.

" _Oh, it's bullshit just because I'm good at it for once!_ " Haru spat out at them under his breath.

" _If I say yes, will you calm down?_ " Lee mused, looking entirely unconcerned.

" _No, because maybe, for once in my life, I deserve to be good at something! Maybe, for once, I actually have a chance at having some kind of natural talent! And maybe you just don't like being dead last for a change!_ "

" _Nice try,_ " Lee said, " _But they're still not even close to dead last, not even Uzumaki's habit of making cleaning jutsus go kaboom. You're too good at this._ "

" _How am I too good at this, Lee? How?!_ " he hissed. After all, she was the one who was too good at everything she did. Just like in Konoha with her lack of hand seals, Lee didn't appear to need her wand at all and just went on her merry way, manipulating chakra out of thin air.

" _You have no innate ability to manipulate your own chakra, and as far as I know you still can't water walk. More, with those eyes, you're running on empty. If you're this good here it means that the_ English _style is built off nothing but rote memorization and a distinct lack of chakra._ "

He opened his mouth, closed it, and then opened it again. He really wanted to argue with her, he really badly wanted to argue with her, but he couldn't find the words. The rage, the confidence, it was all gone, drifting in the wind like particles of dust.

" _Oh good, it appears Dead Last has landed back on the planet Earth,_ " Lee said, patting him consolingly on his back. " _Have to make sure your ego doesn't get too large or else the enemy ninja will murder you for sure._ "

Yes, and they wouldn't want that, now would they?

He looked up across the room to where the student, some poor Hufflepuff, flushed in defeat at having failed to produce the spell for the exam and had to walk back in utter shame. Rote memorization...sure it felt like rote memorization, but that couldn't possibly be it if the English kept failing at it too.

Could it?

Never mind, he didn't care anymore. This would all be over soon enough anyway, and then Haru would be back in Konoha where the food didn't move, he wasn't in the academy, and he was the absolute worst at his profession.

" _Hey, Dead Last, quit moping and get up._ " Something shook his shoulder rather forcefully. " _Class is finally over._ "

Haru lifted his head, blinked, blinked again, and noted that class did appear to be over and that he had spent the last half of it obliviously sulking. Good god, you'd think after all these years he'd just accept it and move on already. Although it was hard when Lee reminded him at every turn.

He looked around, noting that the other two-thirds of the former team seven were missing. " _Where's—_ "

Kushina sighed and shook her head, looking more than a little annoyed. " _Namikaze dragged Lee off, saying something about that first task coming up tomorrow. I think he wants to figure out what's actually going on since they didn't call it off when Lee slaughtered the fire death scorpions. If I didn't agree with him, for once, it never would have happened._ "

" _Don't we still have_ Potions _though?_ " Haru asked, but Kushina just gave him a silent look, as if to ask him if class had ever stopped Lee from doing what she needed to do before. Normally, it would have stopped Minato, but Haru supposed the mission came first in this case.

That, and Minato seemed to have decided that self-study was the best way to get things done in Potions, as most of the time it just turned into a cat fight between Lee and Snape over whether Lee's magical potions created from nothing were legitimate or not.

" _Yeah, and I'm sure we'll see Namikaze's shadow clone already waiting for us,_ " Kushina said, reminding Haru that this was also a distinct possibility, as with Jiraiya for a master and the jonin exams around the corner, Minato would be privy to the forbidden techniques that Tobirama-shishou said Haru wasn't touching until he could water walk.

Which, of course, was probably never going to happen.

He sighed, stepped outside with Uzumaki, and immediately stopped in his tracks. There, looking as if they'd been waiting just for them, were Malfoy Draco and his unpaid goons.

"Well, if it isn't Mad-Eye's other ferret," Malfoy sneered across at them, crossing his arms while his hulking friends loomed over his shoulder.

Had… Haru heard that right? What the hell did that even mean?

"You think I wouldn't figure it out?" the boy smirked.

Figure it out, figure what out, what conversation had Haru just stumbled into? He glanced at Kushina, wondering if Malfoy meant her, but she looked just as confused as Haru did.

"You think I wouldn't find out who's been killing off all of that half-wit giant's beasts and pinning it on me?!"

What?

Kushina started laughing. She actually hunched over she was laughing so hard, moved against the wall to catch her breath while Haru could only just stand there.

"Wait," Haru said slowly, "You mean… You mean Lee!"

Hadn't Lee said something about that? Well, sure, Lee spent every class period they'd had so far in Care of Magical Creatures killing off the death scorpions, and Haru had sat back and wished her well. However, he was pretty sure Lee had made some off-handed comment about visiting Hagrid-sensei's after class and murdering the remaining beasts and… And pinning the blame conveniently on Malfoy Draco.

"You mean Ellie!" Haru blurted, remembering Lee's English name at the last minute.

"Why would Ellie Potter do something as stupid as using a Malfoy as a cover up?" Malfoy sneered, clearly not knowing Lee at all or how little respect she had for Malfoy Draco of the Malfoy clan. "No, this comes from someone who had the gumption to challenge me in defense. This comes from someone who doesn't realize just what they're dealing with."

"What he's dealing with?" Kushina blurted as she caught her breath in between giggles, "He kicked your ass, Ferret! With basic _kata_ , he kicked your ass with basic _kata_ , oh my god weeks later and it's still priceless."

"He did not kick my ass!"

"Right," Kushina drawled before stepping forward, grinning to herself as she began to walk past her incensed counterparts. "Well, we'd best get going to Potions. See you there, Ferret."

"Duel," Malfoy sneered again, turning his attention back to Haru, "Outside at midnight tonight, the red-headed tart can be your second and—"

Haru moved forward, still wondering if England really was that genjutsu Lee was always ranting about, but this apparently wasn't the right move.

"Don't you walk past me!" Malfoy cried, drawing out his wand, but before he could even think of casting spells in the hallway (which Haru didn't think was allowed if he was remembering right), Haru smacked it out of his hand and once again punched Malfoy Draco in the face.

The goons stared in shock as, once again, their leader went down without a fight.

Haru just stared.

" _… You know, I'd say something, but I really can't think of anything,_ " Kushina said as she walked back towards him.

Neither could Haru.

 

* * *

 

 

The morning of November the twenty-fifth was a brisk one, that biting edge of winter just approaching, the sky overcast and pale. It was not a day one usually saw civilians loitering out for hours on end. Normally, on this kind of day, it was only those who had no choice would find themselves outside enjoying the unpleasantness of the weather.

Yet, here they all were, students, staff, and many more besides sitting in the Hogwarts Quidditch stands waiting for this Triwizard Tournament to begin.

"Wow, they really did all come, didn't they?" Hashirama said with his typical idiot's smile. "This is more of a turnout than even the chunin exams."

The chunin exams, Tobirama was guessing, were the closest thing that Konoha had to the Triwizard Tournament. The jonin exams didn't typically draw so many spectators, mostly because it lacked that final traditional tournament round, but even the chunin exams typically only drew those who had an interest in the upcoming potential chunin or a close personal connection to those competing.

Only, instead of being seated in the kage box, or the close equivalent here of the judge's box featuring the headmasters of the three competing schools, Tobirama and Hashirama were seated in the highest seats in the stand. They had a bird's eye view of the arena, which featured a landscape of craggly rock with an open clearing in the middle where presumably some kind of a fight would take place.

A fight against who or what, however, had yet to be revealed, even to the audience.

"She'll do fine," Hashirama said, patting Tobirama on the shoulder. "Even if it goes south, she's… Well… She is Eru Lee."

"It's not her I'm worried about," he retorted automatically, except no, it was her he was concerned about. He still didn't like this, whatever this was, and part of the reason for this seat in the stands was not only to watch the fight but to watch the audience as well.

This, after all, was one of three moments the English had guaranteed themselves. A first task, a second, and then a final third.

"This First Task will likely be used as surveillance," Tobirama concluded. "They'll observe her against whatever the _English_ have set up for her and assess their own plans in preparation for the other two. Given how much these people trust in the fuinjutsu binding her, they know that this is not their only chance."

Had this been his mission, his goal, that would be what he would choose to do. Watch, wait and see, and then use either the second or third and final task to move in. They had time yet, and given what they had likely expected of Lee, they would need time to reevaluate.

"Yes, but who is the they, Tobi?" Hashirama asked, "Is it Dumbledore, this _English_ ministry, or the missing nin?"

And that was truly the trouble, wasn't it? Tobirama didn't know.

Dumbledore had not been wrong; everyone had some motivation for desperately wanting Lee in England, to the point, perhaps, of setting up this entire Triwizard Tournament to begin with. However, even near a month in this place and Tobirama was still a foreigner. He didn't know these people or the players, only what the civilians chose to write about and the war that they suspected was over.

A war that Dumbledore suspected was not.

"Regardless, after this task, we should head back to Konoha," Tobirama said. "It's time I start putting those books in the compound library and past time we debrief Hiruzen and have a discussion with our friend the missing nin."

"Right, him," Hashirama said. "That will certainly be interesting. He really told us everything without telling us anything at all, didn't he?"

He let them believe what they wished to believe, see what they could easily imagine, a world in which England was not so different from Konoha. What he thought he'd gain from that, Tobirama still didn't know, because as it was they had not let him return to his country and now…

Well, depending on the outcome here, perhaps they would. It was leverage Tobirama hadn't imagined they'd had in coming to this place, that they sheltered not simply an English nuke nin, but for all intents and purposes the English nuke nin whose mere name caused its citizens to cower in terror.

For Eru Lee's bloodline, Konoha would not hesitate to unleash a weapon like that back upon its people.

"Do you think we're at war yet?" Hashirama asked, breaking Tobirama from his thoughts.

"I hope not." It was the best answer he could give, the only one, truly, as they could all smell war on the horizon once again. It was like how it'd been in those early days during the Kage summit, tension in everywhere and everything, shinobi skirting the borders of countries waiting for some signal as alliances were formed behind closed doors.

"But you don't think we can avoid it," Hashirama said with a sigh.

"No," Tobirama replied honestly, "I don't think we can avoid this one."

Strange—to Tobirama, it didn't feel as if it had been all that long ago that Hashirama had dreamed his hidden village might spell the end of conflict between shinobi. They had not imagined the devastating scale that wars between entire hidden villages could encompass. Now it was not simply clans that disappeared, but entire nations.

The second war had spelled the end for Uzushio and Ame. What would this third war bring them?

"Do you think they'll finally put us back on the roster?" Hashirama asked.

"Not at first," Tobirama replied. "He'll save us and Kushina for later, for when the other villages start using jinchuuriki. Hiruzen will wait to escalate. It will be the rest of them, Namikaze, Haru, and perhaps even Lee who will taste battle first."

If it extended long enough, if the other villages pulled out all their stops, then Hiruzen would most certainly place Tobirama and Hashirama back into the heat of battle. For all that Tobirama had not always enjoyed his retirement in these recent years, he had not missed the heat of battle or its bloody aftermath.

Too soon, was he the only one who felt it was still too soon?

"I suppose it means we should enjoy this while we can, right Tobi?"

"You mean this blatant affront against our comrade?" Tobirama asked, watching as his brother spluttered, but the man had a point. England, for all of Dumbledore's concerns, was not at war and had not been for over ten years.

These children weren't training for battle or survival, death wasn't guaranteed in their future, and for what time was left to them, Tobirama could enjoy this world that was almost like the world Hashirama had envisioned. A place where shinobi, those who wielded chakra, could turn their expertise to something other than death. To academia, law, art, any and every profession open to a civilian enhanced by the ninja arts.

Lee would never agree, would never see it for herself, but this place was half of the world Hashirama had wanted.

 

* * *

 

 

"Dragons?" Lee asked.

Her voice was calm, cool, and collected, but beneath it was a maelstrom of killing intent that was not to be contained. The three others, her fellow champions and cannon fodder, all glanced down at her as if they couldn't quite help themselves.

Hagrid, that sly bastard. After all of that, he had blurted the truth with the thought of perfecting his cover, laughing in Lee's face, or else completely throwing her off the track and provoking her into murdering his death scorpions.

It really was almost like Orochimaru. Orochimaru made no pretense of hiding his demeanor beneath gruff warmth, as Hagrid did, but were Lee to do something to Orochimaru, she would find herself poisoned in a ditch being eaten by a snake. One did not cross Orochimaru-sama lightly.

If one, apparently, murdered Hagrid's evil pets as well as his evil chakra-filled books, he let them dig their own graves while he cackled.

Except, it hadn't just been him, had it? Moody had approached her not too long after, right in the middle of the hallway, and asked if there wasn't something she'd like to see which might aid her with the First Task. Lee had left him the illusion that she had followed, watching as he turned away, triumphant, and wondering why an Englishman would choose to give her information.

Lee was being played, and she didn't like it.

"Yes, Miss Potter," the British kage equivalent, the Minister of Magic, said with a tight grin. "Dragons, from all around the world, no less."

Kage equivalent, Lee thought, well that might be much too kind. This man had a nervous, almost desperate air about him, where he grappled and attempted to cling to authority with as much strength as he could muster. No, the real power here was Dumbledore.

And Crouch knew it.

"Now, Miss Delacour, you first," the man said, moving towards the blonde. The girl, with a glance towards the others, dug into the bag and removed a small miniature dragon.

They went, one after the other, until finally it was Lee's turn to pull, "The Hungarian Horntail."

Even though it was miniature, Lee thought it somehow looked larger and more aggressive than the other dragons by half. More, it was covered in sharp spines that, on a full-sized dragon, were sure to be delightful.

Lee tuned the rest of it out, much the way she'd tuned out the wand weighing and press conference earlier in the day, mind spinning as she considered what this could mean.

Dragons, dragons could be quite deadly; they could count on the dragon to slay her and use it as the excuse to mourn her passing. But what if they didn't want her death? After all, Lee had proved she had little to no interest in England, and her death as a symbol would be shortsighted at best. Would they fake it here then spirit her away somewhere to turn her into an agent of some foreign village?

And was it truly dragons she would be fighting, or would something much worse be prepared for her? Something that might show her hand as early as the First Task and give her enemies everything they needed to plan around her.

In the chunin exams, the first task was always dedicated to information gathering and stealth; what if that was their aim here?

More, what, exactly, was Lee supposed to do to win this, to prove she could handle this dragon-fighting business that much more than the others? Was it speed, use of difficult jutsus, appeal to the audience?

The other champions paced about the tent, preparing themselves one by one for their individual dragons, and outside they were met with cheers, roars, and rapturous applause as each was presumably victorious, or at the very least not dead.

Hagrid, Moody, dragons, and a goblet where Lee's name had been stuck in despite her not having set foot here since 1984. Yes, between all of that, Lee had made up her mind. The plan wouldn't change in the slightest. Lee was going to spend this task watching the watchmen.

As Cedric, the last contestant aside from her, left the tent, Lee stood, cracked her neck, and created something rather familiar out of chakra.

" _I'm Eru Lee and I like battling dragons in pointless shows to entertain the civilian masses and earn_ English _fame and fortune!_ "

Lee had promised herself she wouldn't do this. No—she had promised she would no longer go down this path for emotional support. Never again would there be an emotional support Lee, and even the other clones… Slowly, too, she would let them fade from this world and slip from the Uchiha's and Orochimaru's grasping fingers.

" _Eru-sama,_ " a perfect replication of Lee said with a wild grin, giving a small bow towards her commanding officer and creator.

Lee bowed respectfully in turn. " _Give them a show, my friend, and let them believe you're capable of only their_ English _parlor tricks at best._ "


	39. The First Labor of Lee

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Brought to you in part early by anon, thanks anon. Thanks to GlassGirlCeci on fanfiction for betaing the chapter.

_In which the golden trio considers recent changes in Ginny Weasley and the power of friendship, Lee reveals the truth about England to a very dubious Minato, and Lee spends a few minutes in Dead Last's shoes._

 

* * *

 

 

Hermione watched as Cedric Diggory, Hogwarts' champion and the last expected champion of the tournament, successfully made his retreat with the golden egg intact. Cedric, however, hadn't fared quite as well as the egg.

"Bloody hell," Ron said next to her, sucking in a breath as Cedric disappeared from sight even with the roaring of the crowd and the judges announcing scores. "Did you see his face?"

Cedric had managed to distract his dragon by transfiguring a rock into a frantic dog. Unfortunately, this had only distracted the dragon for so long, and before Cedric could reach the egg, half of his face had been burned. It was nothing Madame Pomfrey couldn't fix—Hermione supposed that was the miracle of magic—but it did highlight the dangers of the Triwizard Tournament. Both Fleur Delacour and Viktor Krum had also been injured in their attempts, leaving not one participant unscathed thus far, with only fourteen-year-old Eleanor Lily Potter remaining.

"Do you think we should have told her?" Neville asked. He didn't provide any context, but then he didn't need to.

It'd been weighing on Hermione for days now, even since this morning, because the fact was that she, Neville, and Ron all knew exactly what was in store for the participants. Hagrid, while delightful as always, was just as terrible at keeping secrets as ever.

Hermione, a month ago, would have thought that of course they'd tell Ellie. Sure, it was technically cheating, but going against a dragon might get her killed. Now though… She'd first reasoned it away by saying that Ellie wouldn't want her help, that she probably somehow already knew anyway (hadn't she said as much when they went to visit Sirius?). At the time there'd been all kinds of reasons not to go out of her way. However, beneath all of this, there was the small fact that Hermione just didn't want to help Ellie. She didn't necessarily want to see her hurt in all of this, but that didn't mean Hermione wanted to help her either.

Hermione hadn't forgotten what Ellie had said, and worse, what Ellie Potter believed in. If Ellie won this, won anything, it would only serve to make her think that she was right in some way. Just as Hermione hadn't stood it with Draco Malfoy and his ilk, she was not going to stand it with Ellie Potter.

Except, after seeing Cedric's face…

"I guess it's too late now," Ron said.

"Maybe Ginny told her," Hermione said hesitantly.

"How would Ginny know?" Ron asked. "We didn't tell her anything."

"If you haven't noticed, Ron, Ginny is disturbingly good at ferreting out secrets," Hermione responded in exasperation, because where had Ron been all these years? Sometimes Hermione wondered if the girl had her own spy network; she seemed to know everyone and everything, and half the time Hermione, Neville, and Ron ended up consulting her to find out just what was going on.

If Ginny hadn't had… Well, if her first year hadn't happened, and she had a little more work ethic, Hermione wondered if she wouldn't be the most brilliant witch in the school.

"No she isn't," Ron said, oblivious to his younger sister as always, "And even if she was, why do you think she'd tell them?"

Probably for that same reason: Ginny liked information. Ginny liked to be very well informed and be the go-to source for them. The way things were heading, even if Hermione really didn't want to admit it, Ginny was the only student in the entire school who knew anything of worth about the shinobi. Ginny gave them information, they shared information and trust with her, and Ginny in turn could share information back with them.

It really was a miracle Ginny Weasley hadn't been put in Slytherin.

"Where is Ginny, anyway?" Ron asked.

"Guess," Neville said glumly, pointing across the stands to where, in the middle of Durmstrang gray and Beauxbatons blue, was Konoha's militaristic dark green and a single grinning Hogwarts student.

"Dammit, Ginny!" Ron said. "Mione, we've got to put a leash on that girl!"

"Honestly, Ron, Ginny's—" Hermione paused; grown woman was not the right word for thirteen-year-old Ginny Weasley. "She's old enough to make her own choices. Poor choices, but she can still make them."

And, again, as much as Hermione hated to admit it and wouldn't say aloud unless Neville or Ron really pressed, they probably needed Ginny sitting over there. Somebody had to figure out what, if anything, they were up to, and given that paranoia seemed to be a lifestyle for them, Ginny truly was their best option. Following them around like they did Snape in their first year, especially as they constantly spoke in a foreign language, just wasn't going to cut it this time.

"What do you think they're talking about?" Ron asked, squinting over to get a better look at his little sister.

"Really, Ron?" Hermione asked, honestly at her wit's end. She loved Ron, she truly did, but sometimes he was so stupid that she just wanted to punch him. "What do you think they're talking about? They're talking about the task, of course; Ellie should be out here any minute."

"Then why does she look so… happy?" Ron asked, hesitating over that last word as if he couldn't believe he was saying it. Hermione understood though.

Hermione had only met Ginny briefly, before her first year of Hogwarts, and she'd been such a bright and energetic little girl who loved nothing more than Quidditch and her older brothers. Hermione had found her a tad obnoxious at the time, as had Ron, who made no point of hiding it (as siblings often did). Hermione wished it had made more of an impression, though, that she could go back and tell herself to pay attention because Ginny would never be like that again.

The next year, by the time Hermione started paying attention to Ginny again, the girl had already changed seemingly irrevocably. All that summer she was terribly quiet, her thoughts unreadable as she just… watched everything. As time went by, and she emerged from her shell again, she emerged colder with her prankster's humor replaced by scathing dry wit and her smile with cold apathy and general detachment.

Ginny wasn't smiling at the moment; in fact, she looked rather annoyed as she glared at Minato Namikaze, who just politely smiled back, but she looked more alive than Hermione had seen her since Hermione's first summer.

"Of all the friends she could make," Neville said quietly, a small, sad, but fond smile on his lips as he looked on with them.

Hermione opened her mouth but then closed it.

Friends…

Even more than the two of them, who'd always been Ron's friends who'd then taken in Ginny after everything that had happened, these people who believed in nothing Ginny believed in were…

"Well," Hermione finally said with her own smile as she watched Kushina Uzumaki break into hysterics over Ginny and Minato's glaring standoff, "Maybe she'll Bat-Bogey Hex some sense into the lot of them."

 

* * *

 

 

"So, is this like any of these _chunin_ exams of yours?" Ginny asked, glancing over at Minato. "Lee's brought those up more than once."

Minato normally would answer, perhaps should answer, but he had the feeling that Weasley Ginny didn't care about the answer so much as getting some sort of reaction out of Minato.

She was subtly prying into Konoha, into Lee's past, and had been doing so almost since the moment she'd sat down next to them cheerfully declaring that she couldn't leave her shinobi friends to rot in the stands. Minato had decided that he wasn't going to have any of it.

"Well, I guess," Kushina responded in Minato's stead. "Though… I think these might be more lethal than the _chunin_ exams. Which, given the way you people talk, I would never have guessed."

Lee had guessed it, had in fact been ranting about that very topic for weeks now.

" _Oh, they may pretend to be clueless civilians,_ " Lee had said in the middle of the night, dragging Minato outside Team Konohagakure's log cabin at god knew what hour. " _They may pretend that the idea of murder shocks and appalls them, but I know the truth now, I've seen it, it's all a front!_ "

" _A front?_ " Minato asked, mind still half asleep, but Lee apparently was not to be stopped.

" _This place, Minato, is far worse than Iwa, Kumo, or Kiri,_ " Lee said, eyes practically glowing in the dark with the force of her conviction, " _But its citizens are so desensitized, its propaganda machine is so efficient, that none of them have realized where they are or what's coming for them._ "

" _What's coming for them?_ " Minato parroted.

Out of nowhere, Lee produced a board with pinned pictures of magical beasts, Hogwarts' professors, and more, with red strings connecting each. " _Care of Magical Creatures is a grisly death trap, one that can only be survived by either skill or pure luck._ Potions _, similarly, is a death trap in which Snape Severus pushes you beyond your emotional limits into making some fatal error and gruesomely poisoning yourself. Defense, apparently, has somehow been cursed with chakra to drive out the professor each and every year, ensuring that no student receives an adequate education to face the perils of their other courses. Divination destroys your will to live as you spend the entire class constantly predicting your own harrowing demise—_ "

Minato stared at the thing, wondering if Lee had conjured it out of thin air or if she had been pondering it enough to have set it up inside her mind before bringing it into reality. Either way, he found himself more than a little disturbed.

" _I don't know what's wrong with the other courses, but given the pattern, they inevitably promise grave risk! But the courses aren't the only thing, Minato!_ "

" _They're not?_ "

" _Word on the street from Tequila has it that each year since 1991, the school has been invaded by some kind of enemy nin who nearly kills a number of students,_ " Lee said, " _And the school staff apparently only does the bare minimum to stop this, each and every time. The forest is filled with death in the form of mutant, giant, talking spiders along with territorial centaurs, ghouls, and Hagrid Rubeus' failed genetic experiments. And there's a giant man-eating squid in the lake!_ "

Lee took a breath, leaned forward, and grabbed Minato by his collar. " _Minato, this place is death incarnate, and they're all too stupid to realize it!_ "

At the idea that the children would be facing dragons not for an intense examination that would effectively graduate them from Hogwarts and place them into the military, but for the entertainment of their peers, Minato was suddenly starting to come around to Lee's way of thinking.

"The way we talk?" Ginny asked in the present moment, dubious red eyebrow raising as she looked over at Uzumaki.

"Well you're…" Kushina trailed off, grinned sheepishly, "Civilians."

"Why does that always feel like an insult?" Ginny asked.

"It's not," Minato assured her quietly. "There's nothing wrong with being a civilian, it's simply that… We live in very different worlds."

In the elemental nations, all over the continent, the villages were not like this. Civilians were consumed with their civilian lives, learning trades, travelling as merchants, hiring shinobi when needed. Dragons did not enter their worlds, not unless shinobi and war brought them.

" _I'm just wondering what Lee's going to do to the dragon,_ " Haru remarked, chin in his hands as he looked down at the arena, now clear of Diggory Cedric and his dragon and preparing for the introduction of Lee's, apparently quite fierce, opponent.

" _What do you mean?_ " Uzumaki asked, cocking her head.

" _You seriously think Lee listened to the directions?_ " Haru balked, looking down at Uzumaki as if he couldn't believe she'd just said that. " _When was the last time that Lee ever listened to, and interpreted correctly, the directions to anything? She couldn't even do it in the chunin exams! Remember that death labyrinth and how we solved it by Lee just blowing up the whole thing?_ "

"Can you repeat that in English?" Tequila asked, eyebrow ticking and smile strained, as if she was only just barely holding herself back from cursing at them for leaving her out of the conversation.

Still, that was an alarmingly good point that Haru was making. Minato noted quietly, " _She still hasn't told me what her plan is._ "

"You do remember I only speak English, don't you?" Tequila asked, "It's a little rude to purposefully leave me out of the conversation like this."

She'd killed off what she'd thought had been her task early, the demon scorpions, but before that she had somehow known it was dragons and hadn't been too concerned by Hagrid's implied switch out, or, well, in this case blurting of the true answer to catch them off guard. Lee's plan then, whatever it was, must somehow account for both options…

" _Oh, mother of god,_ " Minato said, finally cluing into just what Haru was getting at.

Lee very likely could take care of whatever the universe threw at her, but for her to be this confident meant that she was not putting a cap on whatever arsenal she entered with. Lee was prepared for anything and everything; Konoha and its relations with Great Britain were not.

Minato stood only for Kushina to shove him back down into his seat. " _Hold it, lover boy, Lee's not that stupid._ "

Lee was very much that stupid. Or, at the very least, she was that willfully stubborn and proud. She would win this competition by any means necessary, just to rub it in Hogwarts' face that she didn't need them.

He could just see it now, all of the terrible consequences.

" _Plus,_ " Haru said, pointing out towards the arena where, from the end of the contestant's tent, Lee was now entering in her full chunin garb including her headband, arm strap, and vest, " _It's already too late._ "

 

* * *

 

 

Lee, surreptitiously hiding beneath the guise of your everyman Hufflepuff, made her way into the stands and sought out the best vantage point before the dragon-fighting Lee clone went into action.

The younger half of Konoha's representation was seated near the front, the best spot for viewing Lee, along with Weasley Ginny. Glancing up, it seemed like the Senju brothers had taken the highest seat they could for the best view of both the stands and the arena itself.

Which left Lee with a decision: with Minato and the gang close to the front and their team leaders watching the rest, Lee should cover what was left. Meaning, she should try to guess who, exactly, would have gotten her into this mess in the first place.

If it was a student, she'd blame Tequila, but the girl had placed herself with Minato and seemed hesitant to make any true moves. Beyond that, from what Lee had seen, the Hogwarts population simply didn't think about their situation hard enough to put any kind of plan like this together. They were concerned about their school, their friends, and what Ellie Potter believed in, not how best to trap Ellie Potter within the village.

Which put Lee's money on the staff and visitors being the people of interest.

With that, Lee changed again, away from a skinny, nondescript, adolescent boy (who may or may not have been modeled after Dead Last 1.0 before his rinnegan upgrade) into what the original Dead Last might have looked like in twenty or so years. With her new, thirty-year-old, nondescript henge, Lee made her way over to the visitor's section, tipping her hat and smiling politely as elbows jabbed into her and she got in the way of the view, and took a seat.

And was almost immediately shoved over by a man about the size of Uncle Vernon. "Wotcher, I can't see the girl-who-lived!"

"Terribly sorry," Lee said, only to be immediately shoved from the other direction by a rather forceful woman.

"Pardon," Lee said again, but was squeezed in as someone shouted, "Hey, budge over, I can't see her!"

This…

This had never happened before.

Granted, Lee didn't spend a lot of time in crowds, but she'd never been jostled about quite like this. It was like they couldn't even see her, or, if they could, then they immediately marked her as so boring and unimportant they just went about shoving her every which way and that as they tried to get the best view they could of Eru Lee.

Was this what happened to Dead Last all the time?

Lee craned her head as best she could, looked over the audience to where yes, there was Dead Last sitting glumly, shoved forward by oblivious students who were trying to stretch out their cramped legs behind him.

He looked up, squinted with his dark eyes, and then paled as he recognized what could have been his civilian uncle. Lee, in turn, paled and then tried to grin and wave back at him, letting him know that he should keep his mouth shut.

Dead Last slowly looked down at the arena where the young Eru Lee was now marching out, much to the screaming adulation of the audience. He pointed to her, said something that had Minato almost swooning as Kushina forcibly held him in his seat, and then looked back up at Lee.

She might deserve the look on his face right now, but honestly, what had he expected her to do? Clones, sadly, were the best option she had and –oh it was starting.

The Lee in the arena held out her hand, attempting to summon the egg directly; however, before it could so much as wobble, the dragon descended upon her with hellfire as well as its spiked tail. The Lee clone then proceeded to masterfully dodge, jumping from rock to rock as each was incinerated in turn, keeping just ahead of certain death.

Lee was just glad that, for once, it wasn't her down there.

She took a moment, instead, to let her eyes wander the audience. They all certainly looked engaged, every last one of them, and a fair share of them seemed nervous on her behalf as well. Who, however, looked impatient? Who looked as if they were paying a little too close attention?

Hagrid seemed oddly oblivious—no, not oddly, he looked about as consistently oblivious as he ever did. He oohed, aahed, flirted with his very tall lady friend, and cheered on cue for not only Lee's survival but her success as well. There was nothing in him that hinted at deceit, which meant, of course, that the man was simply that good. However, given that he was that good, Lee would have expected something to have happened to her clone by this point. As lethal as dragons were, the other contestants had survived; Lee was not guaranteed death by this.

Moody seemed focused, incredibly so, but this was not out of character for him either, as he made it a point to respect the shinobi who in turn were the only ones to respect his paranoia.

Snape seemed contemptuous as ever, purposefully looking away from the girl, even as it was clear he was very much focused on the outcome of this. However, he wasn't studying her movement or waiting, at least he didn't appear to be…

So, who was it and what were they waiting for?

"Down in front!" someone shouted, shoving Lee down as they attempted to get a better view, ruining her concentration.

The crowd gasped in terror, and Lee glanced up and cursed, "Oh hell."

The arena was mostly rubble now, large boulders and all shelter having been methodically smashed by the dragon, and the clone stood in the open, the left half of her body caving in from a grievous wound, holding forth a sword in one last battle stance.

Blood pooled beneath her, soaked through her clothing, but the girl didn't flinch and instead gripped her sword tighter.

The stands grew unbearably loud, everyone talking, asking if it should go on, if the girl shouldn't get to the hospital wing. The announcer's box tried to say something, but it was drowned out by the noise.

The dragon lunged and the clone lunged with him, chakra propelling what was left of her forward, straight into the jaws of the beast where it swallowed her whole.

"Oh shit," Lee repeated in the stands, because while that had always been a possibility, she hadn't considered the clone dying in front of a live studio audience.

The crowd went deathly silent, watching as the dragon proudly lumbered forward, each of them waiting for something, some sign that that hadn't just happened…

Then the dragon stopped, grew perfectly still, and began convulsing. It choked, gagged, and then shuddered as its neck was cut through from the inside, revealing the bleeding girl-who-lived and Konoha kunoichi Eru Lee covered in saliva, vomit, and dragon's blood all while still clutching the sword.

She limped, unbearably slowly, through the silence of the stands, to the unprotected golden egg. There, after painfully cleaning her sword with a jutsu then sheathing it, she lifted the golden egg high in the sky, a sign of her victory.

The audience scrambled to their feet and roared with applause, some even weeping with relief and joy.

And Lee, the only one still sitting, could only think that she'd managed to learn absolutely nothing.


	40. The Summer Never Lasts Forever

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to GlassGirlCeci on fanfiction for betaing the chapter

_In which Lee’s clone gives Rita Skeeter everything she ever could have wanted and then some, Hashirama is left to do damage control and as a result creates more damage, and Ginny shows Minato something of who and what she really is_

* * *

 

 

“Excuse me,” Haru bit out in English as he tried to sprint his way through the throngs of English civilians, “Pardon me.”

 

It quickly became a mantra as he bumped, squeezed, and pushed his way through, trying to make it back to the castle before the inevitable happened. The inevitable, of course, being that Lee had gone and made a clone to hurl at a dragon and now that the dragon battling was done it was going to slit its own throat in front of everyone and their brother at any moment.

 

He expected Minato and Kushina to not be far behind him, and the nidaime and shodaime not far behind them, but as it was he was nearly inside the castle and all that was left to do from there was sprint up to the hospital wing (if he could remember where that even was).

 

A voice interrupted his thoughts, “So, it does happen to you too.”

 

He glanced up to see him looking at... Well, to be honest, the man looked somewhat like Haru’s father. A little younger, but the same brown hair, brown eyes, looking like Haru would have probably looked like had he not had an unfortunate run in with mystical peaches. Which was, of course, how Haru knew exactly who it was behind that henge even at a glance.

 

“ _Lee!_ ” he hissed out, switching back to his native tongue, _“If your clone kills itself in there with everyone—_ ”

 

“ _Yes, yes,_ ” Lee said, looking entirely unconcerned as always, though Lee began to rudely push them through the crowd, dragging Haru along as she bounded up the stairs and towards the hospital wing, “ _Luckily for us she was gravely wounded enough that it’s going to take her some time to limp her way over to the poisons or sharp objects. In the meantime, I suppose you didn’t watch the audience at all and notice anyone out of place._ ”

 

No one even glanced at Lee’s slipping into Konoha’s mother tongue, they barely seemed to notice her at all in fact, and Haru wanted to say that she was using her usual subtle genjutsu but he honestly couldn’t tell.

 

He opened his mouth to argue but Lee kept talking.

 

“ _I was, but everyone appeared to unfortunately be themselves, which makes just about everyone a suspect. That, and, either they weren’t trying this time, or they expected the dragon to do it… I don’t suppose anyone looked disappointed by Potter Eleanor’s miraculous victory?_ ”

 

“ _I was a little busy watching your clone limp its way out of a dragon’s severed neck to victory!_ ”

 

“ _Right, of course you were,_ ” Lee sighed, as if that was all some kind of dreadful inconvenience that he’d let himself be distracted by the spectacle that was Lee, “ _Can you believe they failed me for that? Zero points, honestly, when I was the only one who killed the damn thing—_ ”

 

“ _You weren’t supposed to kill it—_ ”

 

Lee sighed, a rather dramatic noise to come out of what looked like Haru’s future body, “ _At this rate I’m not even going to get paid for this assassination attempt masquerading as a mission._ ”

 

Haru wished it was within his skillset to kill her or at the very least beat her into the ground to get it through her thick head that her priorities should be in a better order. As usual, Lee didn’t give him half the chance, as they’d already arrived in the hospital wing.

 

There was Lee’s clone, looking like a half-dead version of Lee, and the English healer who appeared to have been distracted by a genjutsu. And, like Haru had suspected, Lee already had something of audience with god knew who else waiting in the wings.

 

A blonde woman in green with pointed glasses seemed to have gotten to Lee’s clone first. She hovered over the hospital bed, a gleam in her eye, as her chakra infused pen appeared to write of its own accord while a camera behind her flashed periodically at the blinking girl.

 

The clone, looking dazed, was doing what Lee’s clones did best, repeating its purpose in life like a mantra, “I’m Lee Eru and I like battling dragons in pointless shows to entertain the civilian masses and earn English fame and fortune.”

 

The blonde’s smile stretched, almost shark like now, “Oh you poor dear, you’ve said that already. I suppose in your current condition, it’s understandable, it almost ate you alive.”

 

“ _Oh hell,_ ” Lee, the true Lee disguised in a foreign body, cursed, “ _it’s this woman._ ”

 

Haru looked over at Lee, who was now gritting her teeth and looking like she wanted to melt into the ground, but before he could say anything the clone was speaking again.

“My life’s purpose can never be overemphasized,” the clone said blankly, now tilting its head and getting that look Lee always got on her face when she truly didn’t understand something and reached the conclusion that she never would.

 

The grin just got larger, the chakra infused pen seemed to write even faster, flying through sheets of paper, “So, what you’re saying is, that you’ve been mysteriously thrown into this truly dangeorus tournament from exotic foreign lands and are now doing your best to serve your home country in the only way you know how?”

 

The clone surveyed the woman, then slowly asked, “Do you, as an English civilian, find that idea entertaining?”

 

Here the woman did pause, looked at Lee shrewdly in turn, as if she was seeing something she had before. The grin dimmed slightly, a calculating look entered her dark eyes, then she asked, “Tell me, Ellie, do you want to entertain the… masses?”

 

“One could say it is my life’s purpose,” Lee’s clone responded without blinking, “The entire reason for my manifestation in the mortal plane.”

 

“And you remember I write papers for the Daily Prophet. If I write a good story, about you and all your little friends, then you will entertain the entire wizarding world.”

 

“All masses of civilians,” Lee’s clone breathed, and the woman grinned, clearly having Lee’s clone now in her grasp.

 

Why did Haru feel like he’d just watched Lee’s clone go and make a deal with the devil on Lee’s behalf.

 

“Yes, now, with that, tell me about your love life, Ellie Potter. And I want details, sordid, heart-wrenching details and love triangles with an English flare for the home country. How do you feel about pining after Cedric Diggory?”

 

“If it entertains then consider him the unfeeling Romeo to my Rosaline,” Lee’s clone said, forcing herself upright into a sitting position, “He is dating Cho Chang, right?”

 

“Yes, and what about the other one? Another English boy, your friends are cute, but they won’t sell papers.”

 

Lee considered this for a moment, then said, “Malfoy, Draco Malfoy, I like them blonde, and it panders to your outdated aristocracy. Cedric’s the golden, Adonis, athletic Hufflepuff while Malfoy has the Slytherin aristocratic ferret like charm.”

 

Next to him, Lee as Haru was choking on her spit, seemingly incapable of moving or making any kind of reasonable human noise. Haru was right there with her. He didn’t think he could stop watching this train wreck if he tried.

 

Lee’s clone nodded at her own words, wiping her hair out of her eyes, then noted in that tone Lee used when she knew she had already won, “And of course, we can’t forget about my tragic, foreign, backstory.”

 

The pen was writing so fast that smoke was starting to appear at its tip.

 

That appeared to be enough to jolt Lee into action, she moved forward, grabbed the woman by the elbow, and said, “Thank you, Ms. Skeeter, but I believe the girl-who-lived is suffering from being eaten by a dragon. Come back and try again later.”

 

The woman flustered, tried to say something, but Lee threw her out of the room with chakra alone, slamming the hospital wing’s door behind her and locking it. Lee sat down with a sigh in an abandoned chair by the bed, shifting out of her henge, and looked down at her clone who was looking up at her in consternation.

 

“ _Eru-sama,_ ” the clone said with a sigh, flopping back onto the bed, “ _Must you prevent me from doing my job?_ ”

 

“ _You did your job,_ ” Lee said, an oddly tender smile on her face as she reached for her clone’s hand, “ _And you did it well. You’re free to depart._ ”

 

It felt… oddly private somehow. As if Haru was intruding on a moment he was never meant to see. He shuffled awkwardly, glancing at the healer who still seemed caught in the genjutsu, unable to notice any of the racket or even the Lee injured in the bed. He looked away, stepped away, before he could watch it happen.

 

By the time he turned back there was only Lee, uninjured lying on the bed and holding the golden egg representing her victory with no one else in sight. As if the clone had never existed in the first place. Which, Haru supposed, was the point.

 

Haru walked back over, took the chair Lee had previously occupied, and glared across at her.

 

“ _What?_ ” Lee asked, raising her eyebrows as if Haru was being unreasonable, “ _Did you really want her to finish that interview?_ ”

 

“ _You don’t have to be so callous about it,_ ” he said, and even though he didn’t say it, even though it had nothing to do with anything, he knew they were both thinking about that clone she’d left behind. The blind clone they’d run into on the mission that had given Haru the rinnegan, years ago now.

 

Sometimes, often, Haru wondered what had happened to her and if she was even still alive somewhere out there. Working for some unknown master who had access to the sharingan.

 

“ _I’m trying not to be,_ ” Lee said, looking away from him, “ _But sometimes, clones really are the best solution._ ”

 

He supposed he couldn’t argue that, wouldn’t argue that, and it didn’t matter anyway as by that point all the rest of them were breaking down the door with Dumbledore Albus and his underage academy minions on their heels.

 

And, just like always, Lee’s clone went unmourned and unremembered.

 

Suddenly, the dragon and the first task didn’t seem important at all.

 

* * *

 

 

“I can’t drink that.”

 

“Of course you can drink it, dear—”

 

“If I drink it the likelihood of my being poisoned increases tenfold,” Lee smiled cheerfully at the poor, English, medic-nin (mediwitch, Hashirama thought it was called), “Sorry, but I can’t drink that or anything else you give me.”

 

“Besides,” Lee lifted a hand, entirely unscratched, and wiggled her pale fingers, “I took care of it.”

 

The woman looked as if she was torn between screaming in rage or else fainting in horror that Lee, in a matter of minutes, had healed what on anyone else would have been fatal injuries without any assistance.

 

“You took care of it,” this was Tobi, his voice becoming that deadly, cold, calm that was Hashirama’s warning sign that Tobirama was about to lose his temper on a colossal and frightening scale.

 

Hashirama couldn’t say he’d been expecting anything in particular from Lee’s performance but he hadn’t expected her to get eaten by a dragon.

 

“Yup,” Lee said, hopping out of bed and jogging in place to show off her good health, “See, it’s like it never happened in the first place.”

 

Hashirama caught Minato, Kushina, and Haru all wincing in advance as Tobi hit her hard enough across the back of the head to send her sprawling onto the floor. The English gasped, the mediwitch lunging forward, and Hashirama did his best to hold them off with a sheepish laugh.

 

It was always best to let Tobi get it out of his system early.

 

“ _You idiot chunin,_ ” Tobirama hissed out, switching to his native tongue, as Lee picked herself up off the floor, “ _Do you really know nothing at all about subtlety? You let it beat you half to death and then eat you!_ ”

 

“ _I didn’t let it do anything,_ ” Lee scoffed, brushing dust off her arms and glaring over at Tobi with a complete lack of respect, “ _And you try defeating a dragon when you’re limited to these people’s skills._ ”

 

“ _Funny, three civilian teenagers managed it._ ”

 

“ _Their dragons were jokes, I got it from that minister guy, mine was by far the hardest. What did you want me to do?_ ”

 

“ _Anything else._ ”

 

Minato stepped forward, sheepishly smiling and moving towards Lee, “ _Nidaime-sama, if you think about it, Lee didn’t give away anything important and did succeed… Well mostly succeed, in the task—_ ”

 

“ _Don’t fight her battles for her, Namikaze._ ”

 

And then they were all squabbling, Lee and Minato with Tobirama, Tobirama back at the pair of them, Kushina getting involved just because he could, and poor Haru standing there and clearly wishing he was just about anywhere else.

 

Well, it looked like it was up to Hashirama.

 

“Sorry about them,” Hashirama said awkwardly, “But I think she really is fine, otherwise Tobi wouldn’t be acting like that. He’s just gets a little angry when he’s worried sometimes.”

 

“She really shouldn’t be up and about like that,” the medic, Pomfrey Hashirama thought, said as she looked over at the girl, “Even if she looks fine she needs to be examined by a professional.”

 

“Tobirama is a professional,” Hashirama assured the woman with an easier smile, “He’s one of our best medics, and if he thinks she’s fine enough to manhandle then she is.”

 

“She’s really alright?” this was said by that mousey boy that had come with them on their outing to meet Lee’s English godfather, Longbottom. The name had been so comical Hashirama couldn’t help but remember it. He gave Lee a look that was first worried then relieved.

 

With him were the three others, that almost genin team of students, who had also been there on that trip. They’d rushed in behind Dumbledore and, so far, no one had seemed to try and throw them out.

 

“She’s perfectly fine,” Hashirama said, just in time for Lee to step into Tobirama’s comfort zone in order to scream in his face about how Lee was doing better than Tobirama had when he’d first been resurrected over ramen.

 

“Well…” the girl, Granger, trailed off awkwardly, looking at Lee then back towards her companions, “I suppose we’ll just talk to her later then.”

 

With that, three of them, Longbottom, Granger, and the older Weasley made to leave. They stopped, looked back at the remaining girl, the one who seemed to have become friends with the younger shinobi, and her older brother said, “Come on, Ginny.”

 

“I think I’ll wait,” the girl, Ginny said, as she moved to lean against the far wall, staring at Hashirama’s countrymen as they continued to argue with one another.

 

“Ginny,” the brother said in exasperation, “It could be ages until she gets out of there.”  


“All the same,” the girl said with a shrug, and appeared to settle into wait, as if it truly was no trouble at all and she had all the time in the world. The others lingered, then shrugged, and eventually made their way out the door and out of sight.

 

“Well,” the medic said with a huff, “I still want to run diagnostic spells no matter what your healer thinks. I just can’t let her out of my ward after something like that otherwise.”

 

Well, Hashirama didn’t think the woman could necessarily keep Lee inside the ward even if she wanted to. That said, he’d make sure Lee sat down long enough to give the woman a chance to look at her. Otherwise, she’d probably never forgive all of them for it.

 

“Give my brother a chance to calm down and she’ll probably let you take a look.”

 

The woman frowned, huffed, and walked off muttering about mixing potions for the day and how she already had the poor other contestants, not to mention Diggory, to look at and she didn’t need yet another uncooperative patient.

 

Well, when you were pitting untrained students against dragons, Hashirama wondered what they had expected.

 

Which left Hashirama, Dumbledore Albus, and Weasley Ginny lingering on the wall just within earshot but keeping her eyes on Lee.

 

“She did well today,” Dumbledore noted, a smile at his lips, his blue eyes sparkling with fondness, “I truly hated to give her that score, but dragons are rare, and no one wanted to see them injured from this.”

 

“Yes,” Hashirama said with his own grin, “It would have been nicer if she hadn’t been injured, but I suppose she won in the end.”

 

She could have chosen not to be injured, used some skill to shield herself, but she’d chosen not to show anything of her hand to whoever might be watching. Honestly, Hashirama was proud of her, a few years ago and he didn’t think she’d have the kind of maturity and foresight to limit herself like that. She really had grown.

 

“And she didn’t stay injured for long,” Dumbledore said, smiling, but there was something uneasy about it. As if it was trying just a little too hard, to make up for the fact that the girl unnerved him.

 

Even limiting her power like that, they hadn’t been expecting that kind of a performance, had they?

 

Hashirama tried to shake the thoughts away with a smile, that kind of doubt was best left to Tobi, who for all his pragmatism was also something of a human lie detector thanks to his profound sensing abilities. Instead, he quietly said, “I’m afraid though, now that this first task is done, that we should head back home to _Konoha_ for a week or two.”

 

The girl glanced over at the words, wide eyed, even as Dumbledore blinked in shock.

 

“Now, but it’s the middle of the term,” Dumbledore said, “They really shouldn’t miss any class if they can help it.”

 

“It’s been a few months,” Hashirama said, almost feeling pity for the old man just then, “There are longer missions with less contact, but since we can go back, we should. We should be back before the term ends.”

 

“You don’t understand,” Dumbledore said, stepping forward, and this time he couldn’t hide his growing panic, “Eleanor Potter can’t disappear again, not after all this time, not after she just got back.”

 

Yes, Hashirama knew what he meant. Ellie was more than just a lost potential shinobi, a lost bloodline, it was as if… Hashirama didn’t know, Konoha didn’t have an equivalent to what she was to these people. It’d seemed as if the entire country had breathed a sigh of relief of her simply showing up, even if she was strange and foreign, and everyone he had ever talked to didn’t believe she could disappear again just as easily.

 

And when they were reminded…

 

He remembered the look on Black’s face, the uncertainty and panic, at the idea that this wasn’t the start but also the end. His wavering question of hiring her back on a mission just to attend the English school.

 

“The rest of you could go back,” Dumbledore said, forcing his smile back in place, “I understand, that. And the girl could return for a weekend, perhaps, but weeks is—”

 

“I’m sorry,” Hashirama said, because she could go back for a weekend, but that wouldn’t change things in the end. It was better that they realized what would happen now, adjusted to it, than have it sink in later.

 

No matter what happened in this tournament, win or lose, Eru Lee was not staying in Great Britain. He could see the moment it sank in for Dumbledore, the moment the man gave up hope and realized that they had no intention and never would have the intention of her staying permanently, not as one of their own.

 

His smile dimmed, his eyes dulled, and it seemed like a mask fell over his features as everything he’d built in his head fell apart. He’d really believed that she would stay.

 

“Well,” Dumbledore said, the word sounding rough as his lips twitched, trying to reclaim his genial smile from before, “See to it that you’re back as soon as you can, I’m afraid the Yule Ball is a requirement for champions, and the second task will be held early next term. More, I believe it would be a great shame if she couldn’t pursue these opportunities, time at Hogwarts, time with her Godfather, while she’s here.”

 

“We’ll do our best.”

 

* * *

 

 

“Namikaze”

 

Minato stopped, Lee, Haru, Kushina, the shodaime, and nidaime were a few feet ahead of him, walking back to Konoha’s log cabin to pack up a few things for the trip back home. They kept walking, Lee glancing back over her shoulder, but he waved her along with a smile. He’d be there soon, home soon.

 

He and Lee would have ramen again, tomorrow, and they’d be able to laugh over rogue clones and dragons, and shrieking golden eggs just like they did everything else. They’d be able to take a short, well needed, break from the ridiculousness of this place.

 

In the meantime, he could say goodbye to Weasel Tequila.

 

She was leaning against the wall in the hospital wing, giving him that look that was too old for her face again, looking more like a kunoichi than a Hogwarts student had any right to. Her dark eyes gleamed with an amusement that saw entirely too much in him.

 

More, any pretense she’d normally held in front of him, the way she played at being an ordinary civilian girl, was stripped away leaving something cold and calculating in its place. For whatever reason, Minato thought, she was letting him see a glimpse of her true face.

 

She’d reached the same decision he had, Minato realized, that Namikaze Minato was not someone whose presence she enjoyed or would even tolerate.

 

“Weasley,” he said in turn, with his politest smile, “Aren’t you going to say goodbye to Lee too? It might be your last chance; we leave early tomorrow.”

 

“You should tell that to my idiot brother and his friends, the golden trio,” Weasley said, that familiar half-smirk of hers crawling on her lips, “They thought they’d catch up to you later. They’ll be very disappointed when you leave without giving them the chance to.”

 

“Ah,” Minato said, “We’ll stop by at breakfast. Was that all?”

 

The girl quietly appraised him for a moment, looking him up and down, then drawled, “You shouldn’t have made it so obvious, that after this is over and done with Lee means to never come back and reclaim Eleanor Lily Potter and all that comes with it. Or even that she can leave any time she feels like it, which is often.”

 

“Was it a secret?” Minato asked, the girl seemed to find this funny.

 

“I realize we must seem incompetent to you,” the girl said, picking up a strand of her own red hair between her fingers, rubbing them together until individual hairs fell out one by one, “But do remember that someone trapped her here in the first place. More, there are many people desperate that she stay, and will use any means in their disposal to do so.”

 

“Are you suggesting—”

 

“They may go through your people,” she spoke over him casually, as if it was no concern to her, “Hire her for the grand mission of attending Hogwarts and making PR appearances. They may try to use the law, have her magically adopted and bound to an English family, my money’s on the Malfoys by the way. They may even use some archaic ritual, something like the goblet, but they’ll do something. You idiots have almost guaranteed it.”

 

Minato felt his own pretense drip away, the polite smile drifting and leaving only a cold and emotionless mask in its place, finally he said, “A statement had to be made, Konoha won’t buckle, not in this. It’s better that you know it now.”

 

Ginny just smiled, as if she found that delightful, “So it is a power play?”

 

Minato hadn’t spoken to the shodaime or nidaime, the ones who had decided to go now, but he thought so. True, it was about time they went back, but it was also a reminder that they could and that they would regardless of Hogwarts’ schedule.

 

It was a message to all the wizarding world that they didn’t hold power over Potter Eleanor.

 

“That doesn’t change things, you know,” Ginny said, “It still will escalate. Ellie Potter’s tale is unfinished, after all, she still has things to do here.”

 

“They just saw Lee cut off a dragon’s head from inside its throat,” Minato said, “And that was when she wasn’t trying. If your people try to keep Lee here against her will, then she will burn this country to the ground and Konoha won’t stop it.”

 

Ginny tilted her head back and laughed, laughed long and hard, “Oh, Namikaze, you have no idea how fantastic I would find that. I honestly hope it does come to that, just to see the look on all their faces as the girl-who-lived raises Great Britain as its new dark lord.”

 

Ginny began to walk away, out of the room and down the corridor, still grinning widely, “Good talk, Namikaze, you and I might never be friends, but it would be a lie to say I didn’t find you… entertaining.”

 

Minato stood still, watched as she slowly walked away and finally turned the corner and disappeared from sight. Funny, he thought, how Weasley Ginny had gone from distasteful to unnerving in only the course of an afternoon. Even funnier, he couldn’t help but think, that he and Ginny had decided to remove all pretenses at near the same time.

 

He wondered if Lee was at the center of her decision as well. Somehow, he was certain it was, Lee seemed to be the center of everything here.

**Author's Note:**

> Note that this is a sister fic of a kind to "Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus". You don't have to read that one to understand this one, however that said that one is far more in depth regarding where Lily herself comes from, why she is what she is, etc. It also is quite different from "Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus" so I think it's worth looking at least a little at both.
> 
> Comments, kudos, and bookmarks are greatly appreciated.


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